Environmental DNA metabarcoding of wild flowers reveals diverse communities of terrestrial arthropods

Terrestrial arthropods comprise the most species rich communities on Earth, and grassland flowers provide resources for hundreds of thousands of species. Diverse grassland ecosystems worldwide are threatened by various types of environmental change, which has led to decline in arthropod diversity, while monitoring grassland arthropod diversity is time consuming and strictly dependent on declining taxonomic expertise. Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding of complex samples has demonstrated that information on species compositions can be efficiently and non-invasively obtained. Here, we test the potential of wild flowers as a novel source of arthropod eDNA. We performed eDNA metabarcoding of flowers from several different plant species using two sets of generic primers, targeting the mitochondrial genes 16S rRNA and COI. Our results show that terrestrial arthropod species leave traces of DNA on the flowers that they interact with. We obtained eDNA from at least 135 arthropod species in ...