Published online January 31, 2024
https://doi.org/10.5141/jee.23.067
Journal of Ecology and Environment (2024) 48:05
Hyuk Je Lee1*† , Yu Rim Kim1†
, Hee-kyu Choi1
, Seo Yeon Byeon1,2
, Soon Young Hwang1
, Kwang-Guk An3
, Seo Jin Ki4
and Dae-Yeul Bae5
1Molecular Ecology and Evolution Laboratory, Department of Biological Science, Sangji University, Wonju 26339, Republic of Korea
2Oceanic Climate and Ecology Research Division, National Institute of Fisheries Science, Busan 46083, Republic of Korea
3Department of Bioscience and Biotechnology, Chungnam National University, Daejeon 34134, Republic of Korea
4Department of Environmental Engineering, Gyeongsang National University, Jinju 52725, Republic of Korea
5Institute of Korea Eco-Network, Daejeon 34134, Republic of Korea
Correspondence to:Hyuk Je Lee
E-mail hyukjelee@sangji.ac.kr
†These authors contributed equally to this work.
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Background: Longitudinal connectivity in river systems strongly affects biological components related to ecosystem functioning, thereby playing an important role in shaping local biodiversity and ecosystem health. Environmental DNA (eDNA)-based metabarcoding has an advantage of enabling to sensitively diagnose the presence/absence of species, becoming an efficient/effective approach for studying the community structure of ecosystems. However, little attention has been paid to eDNA-based biomonitoring for river systems, particularly for assessing the river longitudinal connectivity. In this study, by using eDNA we analyzed and compared species diversity and composition among artificial barriers to assess the longitudinal connectivity of the fish community along down-, mid- and upstream in the Hotancheon from the Geum River basin. Moreover, we investigated temporal variation in eDNA fish community structure and species diversity according to season.
Results: The results of species detected between eDNA and conventional surveys revealed higher sensitivity for eDNA and 61% of species (23/38) detected in both methods. The results showed that eDNA-based fish community structure differs from down-, mid- and upstream, and species diversity decreased from down to upstream regardless of season. We found that there was generally higher species diversity at the study sites in spring (a total number of species across the sites [n] = 29) than in autumn (n = 27). Nonmetric multidimensional scaling and heatmap analyses further suggest that there was a tendency for community clusters to form in the down-, mid- and upstream, and seasonal variation in the community structure also existed for the sites. Dominant species in the Hotancheon was Rhynchocypris oxycephalus (26.07%) regardless of season, and subdominant species was Nipponocypris koreanus (16.50%) in spring and Odontobutis platycephala (15.73%) in autumn. Artificial barriers appeared to negatively affect the connectivity of some fish species of high mobility.
Conclusions: This study attempts to establish a biological monitoring system by highlighting the versatility and power of eDNA metabarcoding in monitoring native fish community and further evaluating the longitudinal connectivity of river ecosystems. The results of this study suggest that eDNA can be applied to identify fish community structure and species diversity in river systems, although some shortcomings remain still need to be resolved.
Keywords: artificial barrier, bio-monitoring, conventional survey, eDNA metabarcoding, freshwater fish community, longitudinal connectivity, seasonal variation, species diversity
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Research 2022-04-18 48:11
Population structure and regeneration of Zanthoxylum armatum DC. in Salyan, NepalNirmala Phuyal1,2* , Pramod Kumar Jha1 , Pankaj Prasad Raturi3 and Sangeeta Rajbhandary1