Miss Laurence Dugal1,2, Dr Luke Thomas1,2, Miss Abinaya Meenakshisundaram1,2, Dr Tiffany Simpson3, Dr Rose Lines3, Mr Jamie Colquhoun2, Dr Simon Jarman1, Dr Mark Meekan2
1University Of Western Australia , Crawley, Australia, 2Australian Institute of Marine Science, Crawley, Australia, 3Curtin University, Bentley, Australia
Coral reef ecosystems harbour astounding levels of biodiversity and provide essential services to billions of people globally. With increasing threats to these ecosystems worldwide, there is a need to develop and implement faster, more efficient ways to monitor biodiversity, especially in a way that captures various taxonomic groups simultaneously. Environmental DNA metabarcoding has revolutionized our ability to do this by enabling multispecies detection from an environmental sample such as seawater. However, the technique’s capacity to resolve fine scale shifts in community structure between habitats across the reef scale remains to be fully explored. Here, we applied eDNA metabarcoding using the generalist 18S assay to explore differences in coral reef communities between lagoon and reef slope habitats across more than 200 km of the Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia. We successfully recovered 401 taxa spanning 14 different metazoan phyla including Rhodophyta and Chlorophyta. Our results showed strong clustering of samples by habitat type across the length of the reef and revealed both broadly distributed and highly localized taxa. Habitat-driven community dissimilarity was largely based on a strong rate of turnover (and moderate rate of nestedness), indicating the replacement of taxa as a result of environmental characteristics and overall lower diversity in the slope. Our results indicate that despite high connectivity between adjacent reef habitats, metabarcoding of seawater eDNA can reveal strong segregation in the metazoan signals recovered. By generating multi-trophic biodiversity information, our study also provided a baseline for Ningaloo reef from which future changes can be assessed.
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