RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Estimation of biodiversity metrics by environmental DNA metabarcoding compared with visual and capture surveys of river fish communities
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 617670
DO 10.1101/617670
A1 Hideyuki Doi
A1 Ryutei Inui
A1 Shunsuke Matsuoka
A1 Yoshihisa Akamatsu
A1 Masuji Goto
A1 Takanori Kono
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/04/11/617670.abstract
AB Information on alpha (local), beta (between habitats), and gamma (regional) diversity is fundamental to understanding biodiversity as well as the function and stability of community dynamics. Methods like environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding are currently considered useful to investigate biodiversity.We compared the performance of eDNA metabarcoding with visual and capture surveys for estimating alpha and gamma diversity of river fish communities, and nestedness and turnover in particular.In five rivers across west Japan, by comparison to visual/capture surveys, eDNA metabarcoding detected more species in the study sites (i.e., alpha diversity). Consequently the overall number of species in the region (i.e., gamma diversity) was higher. In particular, the species found by visual/capture surveys were encompassed by those detected by eDNA metabarcoding.Estimates of community diversity within rivers differed between survey methods. Although we found that the methods show similar levels of community nestedness and turnover within the rivers, visual/capture surveys showed more distinct community differences from upstream to downstream. Our results suggest that eDNA metabarcoding may be a suitable method for community assemblage analysis, especially for understanding regional community patterns, for fish monitoring in rivers.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.