Metabarcoding reveals strong spatial structure and temporal turnover of zooplankton communities among marine and freshwater ports
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Aim The urgent need for large‐scale spatio‐temporal assessments of biodiversity in the face of rapid environmental change prompts technological advancements in species identification and biomonitoring such as metabarcoding. The high‐throughput DNA sequencing of bulk samples offers many advantages over traditional morphological identification for describing community composition. Our objective was to evaluate the applicability of metabarcoding to identify species in taxonomically complex samples, evaluate biodiversity trends across broad geographical and temporal scales and facilitate cross‐study comparisons. Location Marine and freshwater ports along Canadian coastlines (Pacific, Arctic and Atlantic) and the Great Lakes. Methods We used metabarcoding of bulk zooplankton samples to identify species and profile biodiversity across habitats and seasons in busy commercial ports. A taxonomic assignment approach circumventing sequence clustering was implemented to provide increased resolution and accuracy compared to pre‐clustering. Results Taxonomic classification of over seven million sequences identified organisms spanning around 400 metazoan families and complements previous surveys based on morphological identification. Metabarcoding revealed over 30 orders that were previously not reported, while certain taxonomic groups were underrepresented because of depauperate reference databases. Despite the limitations of assigning metabarcoding data to the species level, zooplankton communities were distinct among coastlines and significantly divergent among marine, freshwater and estuarine habitats even at the family level. Furthermore, biodiversity varied substantially across two seasons reaching a beta diversity of 0.9 in a sub‐Arctic port exposed to high vessel traffic. Main Conclusions Metabarcoding offers a powerful and sensitive approach to conduct large‐scale biodiversity surveys and allows comparability across studies when rooted in taxonomy. We highlight ways of overcoming current limitations of metabarcoding for identifying species and assessing biodiversity, which has important implications for detecting organisms at low abundance such as endangered species and early invaders. Our study conveys pertinent and timely considerations for future large‐scale monitoring surveys in relationship to environmental change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".