- Title
- Environmental DNA can act as a biodiversity barometer of anthropogenic pressures in coastal ecosystems
- Creator
- DiBattista, Joseph D.; Reimer, James D.; Stat, Michael; Masucci, Giovanni D.; Biondi, Piera; De Brauwer, Maarten; Wilkinson, Shaun P.; Chariton, Anthony A.; Bunce, Michael
- Relation
- ARC.LP160100839 http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/LP160100839 & ARC.LP160101508 http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/LP160101508
- Relation
- Scientific Reports Vol. 10, Issue 1, no. 8365
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-64858-9
- Publisher
- Nature Publishing Group
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2020
- Description
- Loss of biodiversity from lower to upper trophic levels reduces overall productivity and stability of coastal ecosystems in our oceans, but rarely are these changes documented across both time and space. The characterisation of environmental DNA (eDNA) from sediment and seawater using metabarcoding offers a powerful molecular lens to observe marine biota and provides a series of 'snapshots' across a broad spectrum of eukaryotic organisms. Using these next-generation tools and downstream analytical innovations including machine learning sequence assignment algorithms and co-occurrence network analyses, we examined how anthropogenic pressures may have impacted marine biodiversity on subtropical coral reefs in Okinawa, Japan. Based on 18 S ribosomal RNA, but not ITS2 sequence data due to inconsistent amplification for this marker, as well as proxies for anthropogenic disturbance, we show that eukaryotic richness at the family level significantly increases with medium and high levels of disturbance. This change in richness coincides with compositional changes, a decrease in connectedness among taxa, an increase in fragmentation of taxon co-occurrence networks, and a shift in indicator taxa. Taken together, these findings demonstrate the ability of eDNA to act as a barometer of disturbance and provide an exemplar of how biotic networks and coral reefs may be impacted by anthropogenic activities.
- Subject
- environmental DNA; marine biodiversity; Japan; coral reefs; SDG 14; Sustainable Development Goals
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1433093
- Identifier
- uon:39164
- Identifier
- ISSN:2045-2322
- Rights
- This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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Goal 14: Life Below Water
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