The precautionary principle and dietary DNA metabarcoding: Commonly used abundance thresholds change ecological interpretation.

ABSTRACT: Dietary DNA metabarcoding enables researchers to identify and characterize trophic interactions with a high degree of taxonomic precision. It is also sensitive to sources of bias and contamination in the field and laboratory. One of the earliest and most common strategies for dealing with such sensitivities has been to remove all low-abundance sequences and conduct ecological analyses based on the presence or absence of food taxa. Although this step is now often perceived to be necessary, evidence of its sufficiency is lacking and more attention to the risk of introducing other errors is needed. Using computer simulations, we demonstrate that common strategies to remove low-abundance sequences can erroneously eliminate true dietary sequences in ways that impact downstream inferences. Using

SUBMITTER: Littleford-Colquhoun BL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9303378 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature