ArticleMolecular ecology2022
The precautionary principle and dietary DNA metabarcoding: Commonly used abundance thresholds change ecological interpretation.
Article in Molecular ecology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Seasonal Diet Variation in Reintroduced Milu (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Article
- High trophic niche overlap between sympatric peacock basses (Cichliformes: Cichlidae: Cichla): Concordant findings from three dietary analysis methods.Journal of fish biology · 2026Article
- DIY: A Practical Field-to-Sequencer Workflow for Metabarcoding the Diet of Terrestrial Carnivore Species.Molecular ecology resources · 2026Article
- Combining Time-Stamped Insect Sampling With eDNA-Metabarcoding of Guano to Reconstruct Community Interactions.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- The Role of Forage Quantity and Quality in the Migration and Diet of a Northern Ungulate During Their Neonatal Period.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Unveiling Diet Preferences and Their Nutritional Drivers Through Metabarcoding: The Case of Alpine Marmot (Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- The apportionment of dietary diversity in wildlife.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
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- Body size modulates the extent of seasonal diet switching by large mammalian herbivores in Yellowstone National Park.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Linking diet switching to reproductive performance across populations of two critically endangered mammalian herbivores.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Simultaneous species detection and discovery with environmental DNA metabarcoding: A freshwater mollusk case study.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Foraging history of individual elephants using DNA metabarcoding.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Multi-factorial examination of amplicon sequencing workflows from sample preparation to bioinformatic analysis.BMC microbiology · 2023Article
- Domestic Cattle in a National Park Restricting the Sika Deer Due to Diet Overlap.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- VTAM: A robust pipeline for validating metabarcoding data using controls.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2023Article
- DNA metabarcoding suggests adaptive seasonal variation of individual trophic traits in a critically endangered fish.Molecular ecology · 2022Article
- Focal vs. fecal: Seasonal variation in the diet of wild vervet monkeys from observational and DNA metabarcoding data.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- The precautionary principle and dietary DNA metabarcoding: Commonly used abundance thresholds change ecological interpretation.Molecular ecology · 2022Article
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Abstract
Dietary DNA metabarcoding enables researchers to identify and characterize trophic interactions with a high degree of taxonomic precision. It is also sensitive to sources of bias and contamination in the field and laboratory. One of the earliest and most common strategies for dealing with such sensitivities has been to remove all low-abundance sequences and conduct ecological analyses based on the presence or absence of food taxa. Although this step is now often perceived to be necessary, evidence of its sufficiency is lacking and more attention to the risk of introducing other errors is needed. Using computer simulations, we demonstrate that common strategies to remove low-abundance sequences can erroneously eliminate true dietary sequences in ways that impact downstream inferences. Using real data from well-studied wildlife populations in Yellowstone National Park, we further show how these strategies can markedly alter the composition of dietary profiles in ways that scale-up to obscure ecological interpretations about dietary generalism, specialism, and composition. Although the practice of removing low-abundance sequences may continue to be a useful strategy to address research questions that focus on a subset of relatively abundant foods, its continued widespread use risks generating misleading perceptions about the structure of trophic networks. Researchers working with dietary DNA metabarcoding data-or similar data such as environmental DNA, microbiomes, or pathobiomes-should be aware of drawbacks and consider alternative bioinformatic, experimental, and statistical solutions.
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