Data for Characterizing the spatial signal of environmental DNA in river systems using a community ecology approach

Environmental DNA (eDNA) is gaining a growing popularity among scientists but its applicability to biodiversity research and management remains limited in river systems by the lack of knowledge about the spatial extent of the downstream transport of eDNA. Here, we assessed the ability of eDNA inventories to retrieve spatial patterns of fish assemblages along two large and species-rich Neotropical rivers. We first examined overall community variation with distance through the distance decay of similarity and compared this pattern to capture-based samples. We then considered previous knowledge on individual species distributions, and compared it to the eDNA inventories for a set of 53 species. eDNA collected from 28 sites in the Maroni and 25 sites in the Oyapock rivers permitted to retrieve a decline of species similarity with increasing distance between sites. The distance decay of similarity derived from eDNA was similar and even more pronounced than that obtained with capture-based me..., The detailed methods explainning how this dataset was collected can be found in the methods section of Cantera, I., Decotte, J., Dejean, T., Murienne, J., Vigouroux, R., Valentini, A., Brosse, S. (2022). Characterizing the spatial signal of environmental DNA in river systems using a community ecology approach. Molecular Ecology Resources 22, 1274–1283., , # Data for Characterizing the spatial signal of environmental DNA in river systems using a community ecology approach

## Description of the data and file structure

The dataset contains the following files:

### **Sequencing information for each sample**

Table with 1)Sample_code, 2)PCR_replicate_number, 3)Site_name, 4)River, 5)Sampling date, 6)Tag, 7)Run_name, 8)Type.

The samples used in this study are the samples having a code in the “Sample_code” column. Samples having “CNEG” value correspond to negative control samples and Samples having “Other” do not concern this study.

**Run** **AIMI-72: **Compressed file containing: 1) Forward sequence file; 2) Reverse sequence file.

**Run** **AIMI-73: **Compressed file containing: 1) Forward sequence file; 2) Reverse sequence file.

\**Run AOHX-1: **Compressed file containing: 1) Forward sequence file; 2) Reverse sequence file.

\**Run AOHX-2: **Compressed file containing: 1) Forward sequence file; 2) Reverse sequence file.

\**Run AOHX-5: ...