Extracting abundance information from DNA-based data

The accurate extraction of species-abundance information from DNA-based data (metabarcoding, metagenomics) could contribute usefully to the reconstruction of diets and quantitative foodwebs, the inference of species interactions, the modelling of population dynamics and species distributions, the biomonitoring of environmental state and change, and the inference of false positives and negatives. However, capture bias, capture noise, species pipeline biases, and pipeline noise all combine to inject error into DNA-based datasets. This review focuses on methods for correcting the latter two error sources, as the first two are addressed extensively in the ecological survey literature. To extract abundance information from DNA-based data, it is useful to distinguish two concepts. (1) Across-species quantification describes relative species abundances within a single sample. (2) In contrast, within-species quantification describes how the abundance of each individual species varies across sam...