Abstract
Marine ecosystem protection and conservation initiatives rely on the assessment of ecological integrity and health status of marine environments. The AZTI's Marine Biotic Index (AMBI), which consists on using macroinvertebrate diversity as indicator of ecosystem health, is used worldwide for this purpose. Yet, this index requires taxonomic assignment of specimens, which typically involves a time and resource consuming visual identification of each sample. DNA barcoding or metabarcoding are potential harmonized, faster and cheaper alternatives for species identification, although the suitability of these methods for easing the implementation of the AMBI is yet to be evaluated. Here, we analyze the requirements for the implementation of a genetics based AMBI (gAMBI), and show, using available sequence data, that information about presence/absence of the most frequently occurring species provides accurate AMBI values. Our results set the basics for the implementation of the gAMBI, which has direct implications for a faster and cheaper marine monitoring and health status assessment.
Highlights
Increasing human activities in seas and oceans are likely to produce impacts on marine ecosystems [1,2]
In order to determine if taxonomic identification to higher taxonomic levels would suffice for ecological group assignment and AZTI’s Marine Biotic Index (AMBI) calculation, we analyzed the distribution of the AMBI species into taxonomic levels and ecological groups (Figure 1)
Even within the same genus, there exist species belonging to different ecological groups, meaning that the identification to the species level is required for a reliable AMBI calculation
Summary
Increasing human activities in seas and oceans are likely to produce impacts on marine ecosystems [1,2]. We identify the best primers to retrieve the most complete representation of the AMBI taxonomic diversity and provide sequences for 22 species for which no genetic resources were available. Datasets: species, sequences and case studies Species list and assignment into one of the five ecological groups defined by the index were retrieved from the AMBI 5.0 software (http://ambi.azti.es).
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