Fecal matters: implementing classical Coleoptera species lists with metabarcoding data from passerine bird feces

Abstract

Diversity inventories are critical to creating accurate species range maps and estimating population sizes, which in turn lead to better informed landscape and wildlife management decisions. Metabarcoding has facilitated large-scale environmental diversity surveys. However, the use of a metabarcoding approach with bird feces to survey arthropod diversity is still relatively undeveloped. The aim of this study was to see if and how a metabarcoding approach with bird feces could contribute to a saproxylic Coleoptera survey of traditional insect traps. We compared two methods of surveying saproxylic Coleoptera diversity (metabarcoding birds feces and deploying traditional traps) over two elevations in a mountain system. The two methods caught different species and different levels of functional guild richness. The metabarcoding method successfully recorded both distinct and overlapping portions of diversity from traditional collections, and the approach was also effective in signaling the presence of both rare species and nine country records. Our results show that metabarcoding Passerine bird feces can be successful when used alongside traditional collection methods to capture a broad diversity of saproxylic Coleoptera. This method, however, has quantitative and qualitative limitations, including the inability to produce species abundance data as well as the generation of false positives and negatives due to biases within the metabarcoding pipeline. Implications for insect conservation As many terrestrial ecosystems lose insect diversity, insect diversity surveys are essential to understand the scope of the loss. Despite metabarcoding approach shortcomings, the declining costs and shorter survey and processing time required for this approach compared to traditional survey methods indicate that it can be a valuable addition to the toolkit for saproxylic Coleoptera diversity surveys.

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