Unlocking biodiversity and conservation studies in high‐diversity environments using environmental DNA (eDNA): a test with Guianese freshwater fishes

Determining the species compositions of local assemblages is a prerequisite to understanding how anthropogenic disturbances affect biodiversity. However, biodiversity measurements often remain incomplete due to the limited efficiency of sampling methods. This is particularly true in freshwater tropical environments that host rich fish assemblages, for which assessments are uncertain and often rely on destructive methods. Developing an efficient and non-destructive method to assess biodiversity in tropical freshwaters is highly important. In this study, we tested the efficiency of environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding to assess the fish diversity of 39 Guianese sites. We compared the diversity and composition of assemblages obtained using traditional and metabarcoding methods. More than 7,000 individual fish belonging to 203 Guianese fish species were collected by traditional sampling methods, and ~17 million reads were produced by metabarcoding, among which ~8 million reads were assign...明确本地群落的物种组成，是解析人为干扰如何影响生物多样性的前提条件。然而，由于采样方法效率有限，生物多样性的测定往往并不完整。在鱼类群落丰富的热带淡水生境中，这一问题尤为突出：此类生境的生物多样性评估结果常存在较强不确定性，且多依赖破坏性采样手段。开发高效且非破坏性的热带淡水生物多样性评估方法，具有极为重要的研究与应用价值。本研究中，我们验证了环境DNA（environmental DNA, eDNA）元条形码（metabarcoding）技术对圭亚那39个采样点鱼类多样性的评估效率。我们对比了传统采样方法与元条形码技术所获得的群落多样性与组成特征。传统采样方法共采集到7000余尾个体，隶属于203种圭亚那鱼类；元条形码技术共生成约1700万条测序读段（reads），其中约800万条读段可被归类为……