Bayfordbury eDNA trials: An experiment in democratising environmental DNA workflows for biodiversity monitoring and natural habitat conservation.

Adam Hillier, Bo Liu, Trevor Dube, Veronica Edmonds-Brown, Chantal Helm

Research output: Contribution to specialist publicationArticle

Abstract

DNA metabarcoding research and commercial application has gathered pace over the last decade. While some studies have involved community scientists in the data collection stage, in this pilot study we explore the possibility of community scientists conducting complete DNA metabarcoding from data collection to final data analysis. A particular aspiration of the pilot was to lay the foundations for a transparent, repeatable workflow that could be picked up by groups of ‘non-molecular’ scientists, natural history experts and nature enthusiasts. Lab work was undertaken at the new Herts DNA Hub, the basic DNA lab kit was based on the portable ‘miniPCR16’ kit by MiniPCR and the final DNA sequence analyses were conducted using mBRAVE, an open access bioinformatics pipeline. Sequencing work was conducted by Deepseq at the University of Nottingham. This trial focussed on the identification of bat species and bat prey from the analysis of bat droppings. The pilot study was successful in that good quality DNA sequence data was obtained and bat prey taxa lists were produced that were consistent with the foraging behaviour of the bat species in question as previously described in the literature. To the authors’ knowledge this is the first demonstration anywhere in the world of a community science DNA metabarcoding workflow exploring ecosystem interactions. As with all DNA metabarcoding studies a key limitation is the lack of reliable information on taxa abundance and a key challenge is the potential for ‘false negatives’ due to primer bias and gaps in DNA barcode reference libraries.
Original languageEnglish
Pages61
Number of pages70
Volume4
Specialist publicationJournal of British Islands Bats
Publication statusPublished - 2023

Keywords

  • Environmental DNA
  • citizen science
  • metabarcoding
  • Long-eared bat
  • Bat diet
  • Leisler's bat
  • Natterer's bat

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