Taxonomic composition of environmental DNA acquired by filtration from the St. Regis River, New York

Environmental DNA (eDNA) surveys have become important tools for monitoring aquatic biodiversity. Barcode sequencing of eDNA generates community profiles that, while potentially biased in both capture and amplification, can nonetheless yield high information content per unit cost. While factors affecting eDNA capture and amplification have been heavily studied, watershed-scale assessments of fish communities and our confidence in such have been less frequent. We performed an initial watershed-scale characterization of fish eDNA using rapid, low-volume filtering with replicate and control samples scaled for a single Illumina MiSeq flow cell, using the mitochondrial 12S ribosomal RNA locus for taxonomic profiling. Our bioinformatic approach [...]