Optimising environmental DNA biomonitoring for Kakadu National Park's freshwater fish communities

Aquatic ecosystems are in peril. World Heritage estates such as Kakadu National Park are not immune to anthropogenic pressures. To better protect freshwater fish communities and obtain relevant ecological data, there has been a shift towards environmental (e)DNA metabarcoding. In tropical lentic environments, seasonal variation drives significant environmental change, particularly the resuspension of particulate matter and phytoplankton productivity. These factors constrain the volume of water that can be sampled, potentially affecting the detection capacity of eDNA metabarcoding. Hence, information about the volume of samples required to robustly detect fish is critical prior to developing metabarcoding biomonitoring programs. In Kakadu, we sampled two contrasting systems with distinct fish communities. Employing two mt-rRNA primers (12S and 16S), we examined the detection of fish sampled from 1, 2, 5, and 10 L. Leveraging MinION sequencing, 15 fish taxa were confidently assigned to th..., , # Optimising environmental DNA biomonitoring for Kakadu National Park's freshwater fish communities

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.zcrjdfns8](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.zcrjdfns8)

## Description of the data and file structure

* CSV files - Occurrence and attribute (ASV) tables generated from OBITools4 handling of each library (clean datasets for each primer)
* XLSX file - Amalgamated binary matrix 

### Files and variables

### Naming convention

TEC = Top End Country; F = Fish;

Fi = Fish16S; Ac = AcMDB07

M96 = 96 barcoding kit

1 = replicate library 1; 2 = replicate library 2

Files - 

* TEC-F-Fi42-M96_1_ASV.csv
* TEC-F-Fi42-M96_1_Occurrence.csv
* TEC-F-Fi42-M96_2_ASV.csv
* TEC-F-Fi42-M96_2_Occurrence.csv
* TEC-F-Ac42-M96_1_ASV.csv
* TEC-F-Ac42-M96_1_Occurrence.csv
* TEC-F-Ac42-M96_2_ASV.csv
* TEC-F-Ac42-M96_2_Occurrence.csv
* Amalgamated_Binary_Matrix.xlsx

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