Multispecies site occupancy modeling and study design for spatially replicated environmental DNA metabarcoding

Although environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding has become widely applied to gauge ecosystems in a noninvasive and cost-efficient manner, false negatives can occur due to various factors in its inherent multistage workflow. It is therefore essential to deal with this kind of species detection errors in eDNA metabarcoding to achieve accurate assessment of species distribution and diversity. To address this issue, we proposed a variant of the multispecies site occupancy model for eDNA metabarcoding studies and applied it to an eDNA metabarcoding dataset of freshwater fish communities collected in the Kasumigaura watershed in Japan.

尽管环境DNA（eDNA）宏条形码技术（metabarcoding）已被广泛应用于以非侵入性且经济高效的方式评估生态系统，但由于其固有的多阶段工作流程中存在多种因素，可能会出现假阴性结果。因此，为实现对物种分布与多样性的准确评估，处理eDNA宏条形码技术中的这类物种检测错误至关重要。为解决这一问题，我们提出了一种适用于eDNA宏条形码研究的多物种位点占用模型（multispecies site occupancy model）变体，并将其应用于日本霞浦流域采集的淡水鱼类群落eDNA宏条形码数据集。