Spider Webs as eDNA Biosensors: Detection of Potential Disease Reservoir Hosts in Tropical Regions

This dataset gathers Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) of potential reservoir hosts of vector-borne zoonoses detected by metabarcoding of environmental DNA (eDNA) extracted from spider webs and conventional traps (CDC, Malaise, and Pitfall). The webs were used as natural filters for passive sampling of vertebrates in megadiverse environments and compared with the detection of vertebrates in bulk insect trap samples (presumed blood-meal signal). Sequencing and bioinformatic analysis allowed the identification of DNA fragments attributed to potential hosts, offering a complementary and minimally invasive approach for biodiversity studies and ecological surveillance. This is a partial database, made available to encourage reuse, comparison, and integration in analyses of biodiversity, environmental health, and zoonosis risk.
The project was funded by Biodiversity Research Consortium Brazil-Norway (project BRC16/19, website https://www.brcbn.com/ ) and the Research Council of Norway INTPART program (project 322457) as well as support by both the High Performance Computing Centre of the Universidade Federal do Pará (project 13/2022) and the National Laboratory for Scientific Computing (LNCC/MCTI, Brazil) for providing HPC resources of the SDumont supercomputer through project ID 56414, which have contributed to the research results reported within this paper. URLs: https://www.ccad.ufpa.br/ and http://sdumont.lncc.br.[This dataset was processed using the GBIF Metabarcoding Data Toolkit.]