Using metabarcoding to ask if easily collected soil and leaf-litter samples can be used as a general biodiversity indicator

•Metabarcoding removes the taxonomic impediment from large-scale arthropod samples.•However, sampling itself continues to be slow, costly, and vulnerable to contamination.•Metabarcoding recovers valid ecological information from soil and leaf litter.•Soil and leaf litter are easy to collect.•Metabar...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Ecological indicators 2014-11, Vol.46, p.379-389
Main Authors: Yang, Chenxue, Wang, Xiaoyang, Miller, Jeremy A., de Blécourt, Marleen, Ji, Yinqiu, Yang, Chunyan, Harrison, Rhett D., Yu, Douglas W.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal and plant ecology
Animal, plant and microbial ecology
Applied ecology
Arthropoda
Biodiversity
Biological and medical sciences
Biological diversity
China
Climate change
Climatology. Bioclimatology. Climate change
Conservation, protection and management of environment and wildlife
DNA barcoding
Earth, ocean, space
Ecology
Environmental degradation: ecosystems survey and restoration
Exact sciences and technology
External geophysics
Forestry
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
General aspects
General forest ecology
Generalities. Production, biomass. Quality of wood and forest products. General forest ecology
Indicators
Leaf litter
Metabarcoding
Meteorology
Restoration ecology
Sampling
Sequencing
Soil (material)
Soil fauna
Surveillance monitoring
Synecology
Systematic conservation planning
Targeted monitoring
Tropical forest
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Summary:•Metabarcoding removes the taxonomic impediment from large-scale arthropod samples.•However, sampling itself continues to be slow, costly, and vulnerable to contamination.•Metabarcoding recovers valid ecological information from soil and leaf litter.•Soil and leaf litter are easy to collect.•Metabarcoded leaf-litter samples show great promise for biodiversity measurement. The targeted sequencing of taxonomically informative genetic markers, sometimes known as metabarcoding, allows eukaryote biodiversity to be measured rapidly, cheaply, comprehensively, repeatedly, and verifiably. Metabarcoding helps to remove the taxonomic impediment, which refers to the great logistical difficulties of describing and identifying species, and thus promises to improve our ability to detect and respond to changes in the natural environment. Now, sampling has become a rate-limiting step in biodiversity measurement, and in an effort to reduce turnaround time, we use arthropod samples from southern China and Vietnam to ask whether soil, leaf litter, and aboveground samples provide similar ecological information. A soil or leaf-litter sample can be collected in minutes, whereas an aboveground sample, such as from Malaise traps or canopy fogging, can require days to set up and run, during which time they are subject to theft, damage, and deliberate contamination. Here we show that while the taxonomic compositions of soil and leaf-litter samples are very different from aboveground samples, both types of samples provide similar ecological information, in terms of ranking sites by species richness and differentiating sites by beta diversity. In fact, leaf-litter samples appear to be as or more powerful than Malaise-trap and canopy-fogging samples at detecting habitat differences. We propose that metabarcoded leaf-litter and soil samples be widely tested as a candidate method for rapid environmental monitoring in terrestrial ecosystems.
ISSN:1470-160X
1872-7034
DOI:10.1016/j.ecolind.2014.06.028