Integrated reanalysis of global riverine fish eDNA datasets shows robustness and congruence of biodiversity conclusions

作者：Yan Zhang, Heng Zhang, Hiroshi Akashi, Camille Albouy, Kara J. Andres, José Barquín, Jeanine Brantschen, Richard E. Connon, Joseph M. Craine, Deirdre B. Gleeson, Alejandra Goldenberg‐Vilar, Alexia María González-Ferreras, Chelsea Hatzenbuhler, Kamil Hupało, Josephine Hyde, Wataru Iwasaki, Mark D. Johnson, Aron D. Katz, Vyacheslav V. Kuzovlev, Courtney E. Larson, Laurène Alicia Lecaudey, Florian Leese, Matthieu Leray, Feilong Li, Till‐Hendrik Macher, Quentin Mauvisseau, Morán-Luis María, Georgia Nester, Helio Quintero, Tsilavina Ravelomanana, Merin Reji Chacko, Mattia Saccò, Naiara Guimarães Sales, Tamara Schenekar, Martin Schletterer, Saskia Schmidt, Nicholas O. Schulte, Robin Schütz, Jinelle H. Sperry, Emma R. Stevens, Sarah Stinson, Steven Weiss, Fei Xia, Hui Zhang, Song Zhang, Wenjun Zhong, Shuo Zong, Loïc Pellissier, Xiaowei Zhang, Florian Altermatt · 发表于：bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1101/2025.09.16.676481 · 被引用次数：3 · 研究领域：Environmental DNA in Biodiversity Studies、Identification and Quantification in Food

The analysis of environmental DNA (eDNA) has revolutionized biodiversity assessments in aquatic ecosystems, enabling non-invasive monitoring of fish communities across diverse regions. However, the global comparability of these eDNA datasets remains ambiguous due to heterogeneous sampling protocols and bioinformatic workflows across studies, making it difficult to assess how robust and comparable the biodiversity patterns inferred from these datasets actually are. Here, we conducted a meta-analysis of 58 riverine fish eDNA metabarcoding studies, covering 1818 sampling sites worldwide, to evaluate the robustness of eDNA-derived biodiversity patterns. We found that species richness estimates and metrics of community structure derived under a common bioinformatic workflow were overall consistent with those of original analyses, despite the relatively high variability in bioinformatic analyses in the respective original studies. Contrastingly, congruence of species identity varied more extensively across datasets, mostly reflecting different completeness and regional relevance of reference databases. Restricting taxonomic assignment to basin-specific species pools improved species identification accuracy, while datasets lacking publicly accessible or well-curated reference data were more prone to mismatches. Year of sampling had a positive effect on taxonomic congruence, such that more recent studies showed increased robustness, also reflecting improved reference database coverag...