Steps forward in biomonitoring 2.0: eDNA Metabarcoding and community‐level modelling allow the assessment of complex drivers of Neotropical fish diversity

Abstract

The Neotropical realm still represents a great challenge to our understanding of species distribution patterns and the role played by different drivers of biodiversity. The paper by Coutant et al. (2022) is a great advance towards a holistic approach to quantifying the contribution of environmental and anthropogenic factors that drive community assembly in the Amazon, and how we can apply such knowledge to guide future monitoring programmes. Disentangling the relative roles played by multiple drivers of biodiversity allowed them to also highlight hotspot areas hosting unique freshwater fish diversity and to pinpoint conservation priorities.

Biomonitoring for Watershed Protection from a Multiscale Land-Use Perspective

“…The use of eDNA is especially interesting in tropical and subtropical regions with high biodiversity and a lack of monetary resources available for large-scale biomonitoring, such as the Amazon, Congo, and Mekong River basins [139]. However, these regions lack the genomic reference libraries to identify taxa in eDNA samples [141]. This method allows the identification of biodiversity hotspots that could otherwise be overlooked, enabling the implementation of focused conservation strategies [140].…”

“…Taxonomy-free eDNA approaches have been proposed to overcome some of these challenges concerning their broad use in biomonitoring [148]. However, they should be considered with caution, given the sensitivity of the results to different bioinformatic treatments and filtering thresholds [141].…”