Evaluation of Soil Biodiversity in Alpine Habitats through eDNA Metabarcoding and Relationships with Environmental Features

Abstract

<jats:p>Soil biodiversity is fundamental for ecosystems, ensuring many ecosystem functions, such as nutrient cycling, organic matter decomposition, soil formation, and organic carbon pool increase. Due to these roles, there is a need to study and completely understand how soil biodiversity is composed through different habitats. The aim of this study was to describe the edaphic soil community of the alpine environments belonging to the Gran Paradiso National Park, thus detecting if there are any correlation with environmental features. We studied soil fauna through environmental DNA metabarcoding. From eDNA metabarcoding, 18 families of arthropods were successfully detected, and their abundance expressed in terms of the relative frequency of sequences. Soil faunal communities of mixed coniferous forests were characterized by Isotomidae, Entomobriydae, Hypogastruridae, and Onychiuridae; while mixed deciduous forests were composed mostly by Isotomidae, Cicadidae, Culicidae, and Neelidae. Calcicolous and acidic grasslands also presented families that were not detected in forest habitats, in particular Scarabaeidae, Curculionidae, Brachyceridae, and had in general a more differentiated soil community. Results of the Canonical Component Analysis revealed that the main environmental features affecting soil community for forests were related to vegetation (mixed deciduous forests, tree basal area, tree biomass, Shannon index), soil (organic layers and organic carbon stock), and site (altitude); while for prairies, soil pH and slope were also significant in explaining soil community composition. This study provided a description of the soil fauna of alpine habitats and resulted in a description of community composition per habitat and the relation with the characteristic of vegetation, soil, and topographic features of the study area. Further studies are needed to clarify ecological roles and needs of these families and their role in ecosystem functioning.</jats:p>

Environmental DNA Metabarcoding: A Novel Contrivance for Documenting Terrestrial Biodiversity

“…Assessing classical and extant biodiversity is conventionally anticipated by morphological and behavioral data obtained utilizing direct surveys, microscopes, binoculars, traps, and, most recently, bioacoustics [ 1 ]. These methods are often biased, intrusive, and/or predisposed by plummeting pool of taxonomic specialists for recognizing specimens [ 2 ]. Moreover, traditional surveys are mostly labor demanding and tedious and can be inefficacious at describing the accurate biodiversity in attendance [ 3 ].…”

Surprisingly high genetic divergence of the mitochondrial DNA barcode fragment (COI) within Central European woodlice species (Crustacea, Isopoda, Oniscidea)

“…The necessity of DNA barcode reference libraries is also important for the modern molecular-based analysis of soil biodiversity (Taberlet et al 2012;Orgiazzi et al 2014;Rota et al 2020). Reference libraries have been already published for a variety of typical soil-inhabiting taxa, e.g., earthworms (Porco et al 2013;Pansu et al 2015;Sun et al 2018), mites (Young et al 2012;Young et al 2019), springtails (Hogg and Hebert 2004;Porco et al 2013), spiders (Astrin et al 2016), myriapods (Spelda et al 2011) and ground beetles (Raupach et al 2016;Raupach et al 2018).…”

Woody encroachment in grassland elicits complex changes in the functional structure of above‐ and belowground biota

“…As methodological caveats, we note that any approach to species detection is subject to limitations. For soil animals, eDNA methods can be impressively accurate in detecting a large part of species detected by conventional methods (e.g., Bienert et al 2012) and thus provide a promising avenue for detecting successional impacts on soil fauna (Fernandes et al 2018, Rota et al 2020). Yet, the specific resolution achieved varies with a wealth of methodological choices (including storage and extraction methods and primer choice (Horton et al 2017, Fernandes et al 2018, Marquina et al 2019; for recent Parasitic animals Predators Algal/lichen feeding animals Macro plant feeding animals reviews, see, e.g., Garlapati et al 2019, Beng andCorlett 2020).…”