Document of bibliographic reference 405100

BibliographicReference record

Type

Bibliographic resource

Type of document

Journal article

BibLvlCode

AS

Title

The advantages of combining morphological and molecular methods to characterise zooplankton communities: A case study of the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve of the Berlengas Archipelago, Portugal

Abstract

Understanding the ecological dynamics of zooplankton communities is crucial to precisely assessing the health of marine ecosystems and their management. Metabarcoding has contributed to a better understanding of biodiversity in marine environments. However, this methodology still requires protocol optimisation. Here, we used a complementary approach combining molecular and morphological identification methods to identify the zooplankton community inhabiting the Berlengas Archipelago, Portugal. The presence of non-indigenous species was also assessed. The results showed that the metabarcoding approach outperformed the classical morphological identification method, detecting more species with higher resolution. Nevertheless, the classical method was able to identify species that were not detected by the molecular approaches, probably due to a lack of reference data in the databases. The comparison between different molecular approaches showed that COI and bulk DNA gave better results than 18S rRNA and eDNA by detecting higher species diversity. However, complementarities were observed between them. Molecular tools also proved effective in identifying several potential non-indigenous species, identifying, for the first time, several potentially unreported NIS inhabiting the Portuguese marine ecosystems. Overall, our results confirmed the importance of combining both classical and molecular methods to obtain a more refined assessment of the zooplanktonic communities in marine environments.

Bibliographic citation

Simões, M.; Cotrim Marques, S.; Costa, C.; da Luz Calado, M.; Lobo-Arteaga, J.; Bartilotti, C.; Jorge Campos, M.; Leandro, S.M.; Antunes, A. (2024). The advantages of combining morphological and molecular methods to characterise zooplankton communities: A case study of the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve of the Berlengas Archipelago, Portugal. Oceans 5(4): 805-824. https://dx.doi.org/10.3390/oceans5040046

Topic

Marine

Is peer reviewed

true

Access rights

open access

Is accessible for free

true