Global biodiversity in freshwater and the oceans is declining at high rates. Reliable tools for assessing and monitoring aquatic biodiversity, especially for rare and secretive species, are important for efficient and timely management. Recent advances in DNA sequencing have provided a new tool for species detection from DNA present in the environment. In this study, we tested whether an environmental DNA ( eDNA ) metabarcodin...

Summary The taxonomic and ecological diversity of ancient fungal communities was assessed by combining next generation sequencing and metabarcoding of DNA preserved in permafrost. Twenty‐six sediment samples dated 16 000–32 000 radiocarbon years old from two localities in S iberia were analysed for fungal ITS . We detected 75 fungal OTU s from 21 orders representing three phyla, although rarefaction analyses suggested that the...

Metabarcoding approaches use total and typically degraded DNA from environmental samples to analyse biotic assemblages and can potentially be carried out for any kinds of organisms in an ecosystem. These analyses rely on specific markers, here called metabarcodes, which should be optimized for taxonomic resolution, minimal bias in amplification of the target organism group and short sequence length. Using bioinformatic tools,...

Analyses of degraded DNA are typically hampered by contamination, especially when employing universal primers such as commonly used in environmental DNA studies. In addition to false‐positive results, the amplification of contaminant DNA may cause false‐negative results because of competition, or bias, during the PCR. In this study, we test the utility of human‐specific blocking primers in mammal diversity analyses of ancient...

Noninvasive genetic methods can be used to estimate animal abundances and offer several advantages over conventional methods. Few attempts have been made, however, to evaluate the accuracy and precision of the estimates. We compared four methods of estimating population size based on fecal sampling. Two methods used rarefaction indices and two were based on capture‐mark‐recapture (CMR) estimators, one combining genetic and fie...