Meeting Abstract
Biodiversity is globally recognized as a foundation of ecosystem health, and accurate estimates of biodiversity are valuable to informing ecosystem monitoring programs and understanding ecosystem functioning. Yet, a standard operational procedure that assesses biodiversity accurately and with consistency has not been established. This is especially true for meiofauna, which is a hyperdiverse community of microscopic organisms living within aquatic sediments. Recent studies suggest that metabarcoding – DNA sequence analysis of a common “orthologous” gene – is a cost- and time-effective method to understand meiofauna diversity. The efficiency of metabarcoding meiofauna has not been well tested, with most analyses coming from samples of select community members (nematodes, copepods). Here, we show the results from analyses that test a higher diversity of community members. We compare the diversity of seven phyla by considering (i) single individuals analyzed with traditional taxonomy and species delineation models applied on a marker gene, and (ii) environmental genetics with operational taxonomic units and sequence variants-based assessments. Outcomes suggest that metabarcoding is biased towards certain taxa. This study supports the urgency of improving the environmental genomics (multilocus) approach while working alongside traditional taxonomists to correctly estimate meiofaunal biodiversity.
