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

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 lab. One of the earliest and most common strategies for dealing with such sensitivities has been to filter resulting sequence data to remove low-abundance sequences before conducting ecological analyses based on the presence or absence of food taxa. Although this step is now often perceived to be both necessary and sufficient for cleaning up datasets, evidence to support this perception is lacking and more attention needs to be paid to the related risk of introducing other undesirable errors. Using computer simulations, we demonstrate that common strategies to remove low-abundance sequences can erroneously eliminate true dietary sequences in ways that impact downstream dietary inferences. Using real data from well-studied wildlife populations in Yellowstone National Park, we f...