Is it worthy to use environmental DNA instead of scientific trawling or video survey to monitor taxa in soft-bottom habitats?

ABSTRACT

Non-extractive techniques such as video analysis are increasingly used by scientists to study marine communities instead of extractive methods such as trawling. Currently, environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis is seen as a revolutionary tool to study taxonomic diversity. We aimed to determine which method is the most appropriate to describe fish and commercial invertebrate diversity comparing bottom trawl hauls, video transects and seawater eDNA. Our results reveal that video detected the lowest number of taxa and trawling the highest. eDNA analysis is powerful to describe marine bony fish communities, but some taxa of importance for the ecosystem such as elasmobranchs, crustaceans or molluscs are poorly detected. This may be due to several factors such as marker specificity, incomplete reference gene databases or low DNA release in the environment. For now, the various methods provide different information and none is exhaustive enough to be used alone for biodiversity characterisation.