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Data from: Environmental DNA metabarcoding reliably recovers arthropod interactions which are frequently observed by video recordings of flowers

Data files

May 06, 2024 version files 186.60 MB

Abstract

Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding promises to be a cost- and time-efficient monitoring tool to detect interactions of arthropods with plants. However, observation-based verification of the eDNA derived data is still required to confirm whether the arthropods indeed previously interacted with the plant. Here we conducted a comparative analysis of the performance of eDNA metabarcoding and video camera observations to detect arthropod communities associated with sunflowers (Helianthus annuus, L.). We compared the taxonomic composition, interaction type, and diversity by testing for an effect of arthropod interaction time and occupancy on successful taxon recovery by eDNA. We also tested if pre-washing of the flowers successfully removed eDNA deposition from before the video camera recording, thus enabling a reset of the community for standardized monitoring. We find that eDNA and video camera observations recovered distinct communities, with about a quarter of the arthropod families overlapping. However, the overlapping taxa comprised ~90% of the interactions observed by the video camera. Interestingly, eDNA metabarcoding recovered more unique families than the video cameras, but approx. two-third of those unique observations were rare species. The eDNA-derived families were biased towards plant sap-suckers, showing that such species may deposit more eDNA than e.g. transient pollinators. We also find that pre-washing of the flower heads did not suffice to remove all eDNA traces, suggesting that eDNA on plants may be more temporally stable than previously thought. Our work highlights the great potential of eDNA as a tool to detect plant-arthropod interactions, particularly for specialized and frequently interacting taxa.