Using carrion flies to assess mammalian biodiversity in the tropics.

Assessing mammalian biodiversitiy is a challenging task. Especially in the tropic where biodiversity is extremely high, vegetation dense and infrastructure poor. Here, we used carrion flies to get insights into the mammalian biodiversity of a tropical rainforest in Côte d´Ivoire. Carrion flies are ubiquitous and are known to feed on mammal carcasses. Thus, they can be seen as samplers of mammalian DNA. Applying a metabarcoding approach we sequenced a short 16s fragment using the Illumina sequencing platform MiSeq and performed taxonomic assignement using the OBITools package.