Rapid methods for quantitative fish larvae community assessment using metabarcoding

High-throughput sequencing of DNA amplicons (metabarcoding) is potentially a rapid and cost-effective method to monitor larvae for management and environmental impact assessment purposes. Nonetheless, there is conflicting information about whether metabarcoding is sufficiently quantitative for such applications. We compared metabarcoding with traditional morphological identification to evaluate taxonomic precision and reliability of abundance estimates, using fish larvae from 14 offshore sites in the Irish and Celtic seas.