Sifting environmental DNA metabarcoding data sets for rapid reconstruction of marine food webs

Marine ecosystems are changing rapidly due to ocean warming, overfishing and a raft of other anthropogenic impacts. Such changes expected disrupt productivity dynamics alter marine food webs, with likely negative consequences for ecosystem services. It is, therefore, essential devise implement methods that can inexpensively monitor in the web structure. Unfortunately, conventional surveying webs typically laborious, expensive often destructive, resulting only small fraction being well studied, an even smaller subset them studied through time. Here, we pilot low?cost approach reconstructing trophic networks tropical, temperate polar regions, using taxonomical inventories arising from published environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding studies, building links based on primary literature information. Although obtained simplified approximation those constructed traditional methods, they generate realistic fit expectations, allow ecological inference over time scales costs orders magnitude than traditionally achieved. We show potential new application analysis promises offer rapid scalable gather vital information structure, hence boosting monitoring at increasingly changes.