Following on from last week’s press release ‘How Clean are Finnish Rivers?’, Vasco Elbrecht et al. have produced a video to explain the methods in ‘Assessing strengths and weaknesses of DNA metabarcoding-based macroinvertebrate identification for routine stream monitoring‘.

In this video, the authors explore the potential of DNA metabarcoding to access stream health using macroinvertebrates. They compared DNA and morphology-based identification of bulk monitoring samples from 18 Finnish stream ecosystems. DNA-based methods show higher taxonomic resolution and similar assessment results as currently used morphology-based methods. Their study shows that the tested DNA-based methods integrate well with current approaches, but further optimisation and validation of DNA metabarcoding methods is encouraged.

This video is based on the article ‘Assessing strengths and weaknesses of DNA metabarcoding-based macroinvertebrate identification for routine stream monitoring‘ by Elbrecht et al.