Brook trout are a species of conservation concern in Southwestern Ontario, Canada, and effective monitoring of their populations is crucial for making informed management decisions. Electrofishing is a traditional, yet invasive, method that allows for fish abundance estimation. Environmental DNA (eDNA) is an emerging molecular tool that presents a non-invasive alternative to electrofishing. This study was a collaborative effor...

Freshwater biomonitoring programmes routinely sample aquatic macroinvertebrates. These samples are time‐consuming to collect, as well as challenging and costly to identify reliably genus or species. Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding has emerged as a surrogate to traditional collection techniques and has been used in whole‐community approaches across several taxa and ecosystems. However, the usefulness of eDNA‐based detect...

Larval fishes provide a valuable metric for assessing and monitoring species, populations, and ecosystem trends and condition. However, taxonomic resolution for this life stage is inherently problematic because of their individual sizes, limited morphological characteristics and high tissue degradation rates. There is little research on methods that rapidly preserve larval tissues for later morphological and molecular identifi...

Allopatric speciation may be the principal mechanism generating new species. Yet, it remains difficult to judge the generality of this process because few studies have provided evidence that geographic isolation has triggered the development of reproductive isolation over multiple species of a regional fauna. Here, we first combine results from new empirical data sets (7 taxa) and published literature (9 taxa) to show that the...