Monitoring invertebrate pests on cowpea crops across China using eDNA metabarcoding

Abstract

Monitoring arthropod pests and their natural enemies provides essential information for pest control decisions in agricultural production. Traditional monitoring methods, such as trapping and visual surveys, have practical limitations because of their time-consuming preprocessing steps and the need for knowledgeable taxonomists. We tested the environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding approach for monitoring cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) arthropod pests and their natural enemies across seven climatic sub-regions of China, comparing it with traditional sample collection and morphological identification methods.