Flower-derived environmental DNA reveals community diversity, species
abundances and ecological interactions in bee pollinators
- Arndt Schmidt,
- Lukas Schillbach,
- Arno Schanowski,
- Michael Greve,
- Christian Baden,
- Christian Maus,
- Henrik Krehenwinkel
Abstract
Flower-derived eDNA holds great promise as a rapid and non-invasive tool
for monitoring pollinators and their plant-associations. However,
pollinators often only briefly interact with a plant and leave little
eDNA, making them particularly challenging to detect. In addition,
taxonomic biases in eDNA deposition and PCR amplification prevent
quantitative analysis of pollinator diversity. These limitations have so
far precluded the widespread use of eDNA in pollinator monitoring.
Comparing flower-derived eDNA with conventional monitoring in flower
strips, we here explore the utility of eDNA to detect community
diversity, species abundances and ecological specificity of
plant-associated arthropods. We show that read abundances are a bad
predictor of true abundances at the community level. Instead, the
occupancy of individual species in replicated flower eDNA samples
provides reliable quantitative estimates of pollinator biodiversity and
detects their ecological specificity very well. Also, we find that
pollinator eDNA can be collected non-invasively, by washing off from
flowers in the field. Our work highlights eDNA analysis as a powerful
tool for the rapid future monitoring of plant-arthropod interactions and
plant-pollinator networks.11 Sep 2024Submitted to Molecular Ecology Resources 12 Sep 2024Submission Checks Completed
12 Sep 2024Assigned to Editor
12 Sep 2024Review(s) Completed, Editorial Evaluation Pending
28 Sep 2024Reviewer(s) Assigned