Multispecies site occupancy modeling and study design for spatially replicated environmental DNA metabarcoding

Although environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding has become widely applied to gauge ecosystems in a noninvasive and cost-efficient manner, false negatives can occur due to various factors in its inherent multistage workflow. It is therefore essential to deal with this kind of species detection errors in eDNA metabarcoding to achieve accurate assessment of species distribution and diversity. To address this issue, we proposed a variant of the multispecies site occupancy model for eDNA metabarcoding studies and applied it to an eDNA metabarcoding dataset of freshwater fish communities collected in the Kasumigaura watershed in Japan.