Meta‐analysis shows both congruence and complementarity of DNA and eDNA metabarcoding to traditional methods for biological community assessment

DNA metabarcoding is increasingly used for the assessment of aquatic communities, and numerous studies have investigated the consistency of this technique with traditional morpho-taxonomic approaches. These individual studies have used DNA metabarcoding to assess diversity and community structure of aquatic organisms both in marine and freshwater systems globally over the last decade. However, a systematic analysis of the comparability and effectiveness of DNA-based community assessment across all of these studies has hitherto been lacking. Here, we performed the first meta-analysis of available studies comparing traditional methods and DNA metabarcoding to measure and assess biological diversity of key…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• SN
  Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung

  Awards: 31003A_173074, PP00P3_179089
• UZ
  Universitätsspital Zürich
• BF
  Bundesamt für Umwelt