Merging dietary metabarcoding into networks: turning “don’ts” into “dos”

Post provided by Jordan Cuff, Fredric Windsor, Maximillian Tercel, James Kitson and Darren Evans.

Do you spend your days incapacitated by the agony of not knowing how to combine your field-based observational data with your dietary metabarcoding results? Perhaps every time you go to merge them, the horror of conflicting data types and biases causes you to run and hide from the mere thought of analysis. Or maybe the thought of such problems hadn’t even crossed your mind! In this post, Jordan Cuff and co-authors share insight from their recent publication on using dietary metabarcoding in network ecology and how to merge metabarcoding with traditional data types.

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Scat Collection Protocols for Dietary DNA Metabarcoding

DNA dietary analysis is a non-invasive tool used to identify the food consumed by vertebrates. The method relies on identifying prey DNA in the target animals’ scats. It’s especially useful for marine animals such as seals and seabirds as it is difficult to watch their feeding events.

In the video below, Julie McInnes describes scat collection protocols that she (along with Rachael Alderman, Bruce Deagle, Mary-Anne Lea, Ben Raymond and Simon Jarman) developed to optimise the detection of food DNA in vertebrate scat samples. The authors use the shy albatross to demonstrate their new methods.

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