Towards long-term monitoring of soil invertebrates in the tropics: a DNA-based approach

A comparison of the efficacy between metabarcoding and taxa sorted morphologically to identify arthropod taxa collected in soil and leaf litter. We compared several different factors in paired metabarcoding and taxonomic samples, including; richness, ability to assess seasonal shifts, relationship with biomass, false positive/negative identifications, and taxon-specific patterns in community composition, with the goal of determining the feasibility of metabarcoding/DNA-based identification for long-term monitoring of soil arthropods in the tropics.