A wide variety of marine organisms contribute to the structure and functioning of healthy ecosystems. New DNA-enabled technologies allow examination of ecological processes and interactions with unprecedented detail. These efforts include DNA Barcoding and Metabarcoding, which provide insight into ecosystem players, community structure and interactions. Nevertheless, the capacity to characterize the natural history and identify species relies on the generation of reference sequence libraries to annotate community profiles. Here, we determine the improved effect of conducting a local scientist-led BioBlitz to better characterize regional marine diversity. We use environmental DNA profiles from Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures (ARMS) to sample three marine communities and compare the before and after abilities to identify derived sequence profiles. BioBlitzes use a voucher-based approach to intensely catalogue and identify large collections of species. ARMS, on the other hand, sample marine communities in a standardized and repeatable manner, yielding unique amplicon sequence variants (ASV) across the entire eukaryotic community. The Oregon Institute of Marine Biology (OIMB), Western Association of Marine Laboratories (WAML), and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), carried out a two-week BioBlitz in June 2019, collecting over 2400 voucher samples throughout southern coastal Oregon. OIMB voucher specimens underwent Sanger Sequencing of the Cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) gene at NMNH to generate a local reference library. At the same time, we recovered three ARMS from around the Coos Bay region and generated metabarcoding libraries using high-throughput sequencing. We compared the ability to identify ARMS ASVs using reference libraries from before the OIMB BioBlitz to the reference libraries after adding BioBlitz derived voucher-based sequences.
Results/Conclusions
One third (33%) of all ASVs were improved by BioBlitz efforts. Significantly, 10% of ASVs that could not be attributed to any taxonomic level prior to the BioBLitz (“dark taxa”) were able to be identified. Thus, this study reveals the importance of regional BioBlitzes to augment characterization of local biotas. This study also exemplifies how regional BioBlitzes can facilitate a variety of ecologic and genomic applications such as recruitment dynamics, larval identification or trophic studies by the enhancement of improved taxonomic determination.