Flow-induced fragmentation and mixing of eDNA for river biodiversity assessment

Abstract

River restoration is an established method for the rehabilitation of river ecosystems in order to combat the current declines of freshwater biodiversity (Wohl et al., 2005; WWF, 2022). The urgency of restoration is recognized internationally, as the IUCN has proclaimed 2021-2030 to be the ‘Decade on Ecosystem Restoration’ (Cooke et al., 2022). So far only few restoration projects have been evaluated based on monitoring data (England et al., 2021), and there is a need for monitoring techniques to assess restoration practices.
The analysis of environmental DNA (eDNA) has gained popularity in the last decades, as it allows for rapid standardized biomonitoring across the tree of life, requires a reduced dependence on taxonomic expertise for species identification, and it is cheaper than traditional monitoring methods. Depending on the organism, eDNA is shed by its host in forms such as mucous, shed skin cells, and faeces. After release, eDNA is exposed to a wide spectrum of environmental variables that may impact its state, transport capacity, fate, and the subsequent inference made by the practitioner (Barnes and Turner, 2016). Our objective is to study how eDNA quantities are affected by flow and sediment transport in river ecosystems.