Environmental DNA metabarcoding of pan trap water to monitor arthropod‐plant interactions

Joshua H. Kestel*, David Field, Philip W. Bateman, Nicole E. White, Karen Bell, Paul Nevill

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Globally, the diversity of arthropods and the plants upon which they rely are under increasing pressure due to a combination of biotic and abiotic anthropogenic stressors. Unfortunately, conventional survey methods used to monitor ecosystems are often challenging to conduct on large scales. Pan traps are a commonly used pollinator survey method and environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding of pan trap water may offer a high-throughput alternative to aid in the detection of both arthropods and the plant resources they rely on. Here, we examined if eDNA metabarcoding can be used to identify arthropods and plant species from pan trap water, and investigated the effect of different DNA extraction methods. We then compared plant species identified by metabarcoding with observation-based floral surveys and also assessed the contribution of airborne plant DNA (plant DNA not carried by arthropods) using marble traps to reduce putative false positives in the pan trap dataset. Arthropod eDNA was only detected in 17% of pan trap samples and there was minimal overlap between the eDNA results and morphological identifications. In contrast, for plants, we detected 64 taxa, of which 53 were unique to the eDNA dataset, and no differences were identified between the two extraction kits. We were able to significantly reduce the contribution of airborne plant DNA to the final dataset using marble traps. This study demonstrates that eDNA metabarcoding of pan trap water can detect plant resources used by arthropods and highlights the potential for eDNA metabarcoding to be applied to investigations of arthropod-plant interactions.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere527
Pages (from-to)1-18
Number of pages18
JournalEnvironmental DNA
Volume6
Issue number2
Early online date12 Mar 2024
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Mar 2024

Bibliographical note

Copyright the Author(s) 2024. Version archived for private and non-commercial use with the permission of the author/s and according to publisher conditions. For further rights please contact the publisher.

Keywords

  • agroecosystems
  • environmental DNA
  • marble traps and minimum sequence copy thresholds
  • pan traps
  • pollen metabarcoding

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