Toward accurate species-level metabarcoding of arthropod communities from the tropical forest canopy.

ABSTRACT: Metabarcoding of arthropod communities can be used for assessing species diversity in tropical forests but the methodology requires validation for accurate and repeatable species occurrences in complex mixtures. This study investigates how the composition of ecological samples affects the accuracy of species recovery.Starting with field-collected bulk samples from the tropical canopy, the recovery of specimens was tested for subsets of different body sizes and major taxa, by assembling these subsets into increasingly complex composite pools. After metabarcoding, we track whether richness, diversity, and most importantly composition of any size class or taxonomic subset are affected by the presence of other subsets in the mixture.Operational taxonomic units (OTUs) greatly exceeded the numbe

SUBMITTER: Creedy TJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6434547 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature