ARPHA Conference Abstracts :
Conference Abstract
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Corresponding author: Erik Rohe (erik.rohe@outlook.de)
Received: 25 Feb 2021 | Published: 04 Mar 2021
© 2021 Erik Rohe, Paul Schmidt Yáñez, Michael Monaghan
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Rohe E, Schmidt Yáñez P, Monaghan MT (2021) Impacts of mountain forest dieback on aquatic insect communities: A DNA metabarcoding analysis of samples from the Bavarian Forest. ARPHA Conference Abstracts 4: e65070. https://doi.org/10.3897/aca.4.e65070
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Mountain forests are increasingly affected by changes in rainfall and pest outbreaks, and the way forests are managed can have direct consequences for the streams flowing through forests. Aquatic macroinvertebrate communities are great bioindicators and changes to their ecosystem likely translates to changes in their overall composition and abundance. The Bavarian Forest National Park (SE Germany) is dominated by the Norway spruce (Picea abies) which, weakened by storms and other stressors, is susceptible to infestation by the European spruce bark beetle (Ips typographus).
The result is large scale forest dieback in some areas, and forest management practices that lead to a predominance of three different forest types (hereafter habitats):
To analyze the impacts these different forest management strategies have on the aquatic insect communities, 30 samples from 11 different streams were taken using kick-sampling. Operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were identified by bulk metabarcoding of dried, ground samples. A mock community was used to verify the setup and a DNA spike-in with three foreign OTUs was added to each sample to measure the biases introduced by PCR amplification and sequencing. Biases varied across samples, but spike-in OTUs produced a pattern indicating predictable biases which could lead to quantifiable metabarcoding results in the future. In total, 260 macroinvertebrate OTUs were identified.
In comparison, a morphological study by
Our findings indicate that forest management can affect stream macroinvertebrate communities, and that this was most pronounced for the Diptera, a group for which DNA metabarcoding is particularly well suited because of their small size and high diversity.
Metabarcoding, OTU Distribution, DNA Spike-in, Bavarian Forest, Forest Dieback, Forest Management, Macroinvertebrates, Insects
Erik Rohe
1st DNAQUA International Conference (March 9-11, 2021)