Benchmarking beta-diversity measures and transfer functions for sedimentary ancient DNA.

ABSTRACT: Analyzing past ecosystems can improve our understanding of the mechanisms linking biodiversity with environmental changes. Sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) opens a window to past biodiversity, beyond the fossil record, that can be used to reconstruct ancient environments and ecosystems functions. To this end, modern biodiversity and environmental conditions are used to calibrate transfer functions, that are then applied to past biodiversity data to reconstruct environmental parameters. Doing this with sedaDNA can be challenging, because ancient DNA is often obtained in limited quantities and fragmented into smaller molecules. This leads to noisy datasets, with a low alpha diversity relative to modern DNA, patchy taxa detection patterns and/or skewed relative abundance profil

SUBMITTER: Cordier T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12753309 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature