Data from: 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 67
families and 14 orders, together representing diverse ecological groups
including pollinators, parasitoids, gall inducers, predators and
phytophagous species. Arthropod communities clustered together according
to plant species. Our data also indicate that this experiment was not
exhaustive, and that an even higher arthropod richness could be obtained
using this eDNA approach. Overall, our results demonstrate that it is
possible to obtain information on diverse communities of insects and other
terrestrial arthropods from eDNA metabarcoding of wild flowers. This novel
source of eDNA represents a vast potential for addressing fundamental
research questions in ecology, obtaining data on cryptic and unknown
species of plant-associated arthropods, as well as applied research on
pest management or conservation of endangered species such as wild
pollinators.