Current Affairs: Examining the Use of Environmental DNA for Relative Abundance Monitoring in a Dynamic Tidal Habitat

Abstract

Assessing the abundance and spatiotemporal distribution of fish species is crucial for informing sustainable fishing practices and developing effective conservation management plans. Recently, environmental DNA (eDNA) has emerged as a promising tool for estimating not only marine species richness but also species abundance, with several studies demonstrating a positive correlation between eDNA concentration and species abundance. Consequently, eDNA surveys not only enhance the monitoring of species requiring conservation attention but may also serve as a method to quantify relative abundance, a critical indicator of ecosystem health. This study investigates the feasibility of using eDNA metabarcoding to estimate relative abundance of marine species in a tidal environment, using Sussex Bay, UK, as a case study. We compared eDNA relative abundance indices, estimated by the metabarcoding method, using two different primer pairs and found strong positive correlations between the results from each primer. Additionally, we evaluated the relationship between relative abundance estimates derived from eDNA metabarcoding index and those obtained from Baited Remote Underwater Video (BRUV) counts. Out of 14 species, only one significant positive correlation was found between eDNA index and BRUV counts. The BRUV surveys detected fewer species overall compared to eDNA, leading to a higher number of zero counts for several species, which may explain the lack of statistically significant relationships. This indicates that eDNA index and BRUV counts do not strongly correlate in dynamic marine environments, highlighting the differences between these survey methods. This study also estimated that eDNA can be detected at least 2–8 km from its assumed source in a marine tidal environment, with an average minimum travel speed of 1.8 km/h. Our findings illustrate the effectiveness of eDNA metabarcoding as a nondestructive biomonitoring method, while also highlighting its limitations as well as the challenges in comparing relative abundances of different methods in tidal environments.