Focal vs. faecal: Seasonal variation in the diet of wild vervet monkeys from observational and DNA metabarcoding data

1. Assessing the diet of wild animals reveals valuable information about their ecology and trophic relationships that may help elucidate dynamic interactions in ecosystems and forecast responses to environmental changes.
2. Advances in molecular biology provide valuable research tools in this field. However, comparative empirical research is still required to highlight strengths and potential biases of different approaches. Therefore, this study compares environmental DNA and observational methods for the same study population and sampling duration.
3. We employed DNA metabarcoding assays targeting plant and arthropod diet items in 823 faecal samples collected over 12 months in a wild population of an omnivorous primate, the vervet monkey (Chlorocebus pygerythrus). DNA metabarcoding data were subsequently compared to direct observations.
4. We observed the same seasonal patterns of plant consumption with both methods, however, DNA metabarcoding showed considerably greater taxonomic cove...