PhD student American Museum of Natural History New York, New York
Environmental DNA (eDNA) has increasingly become a useful tool in the monitoring and detection of new, invasive, as well as threatened species. As a result, this relatively novel technique plays a huge role in biodiversity assessments, especially in regions with high biodiversity such as Nigeria, where some species are relatively difficult to detect by traditional sampling. However, most of eDNA studies have been heavily focused in temperate regions and much remains to be understood about different factors that affect the success of this technique in tropical regions, particularly when being employed in the study of aquatic invertebrates. In this study, we aimed to evaluate the success of this tool for odonate diversity assessments in a tropical biome. We used odonates as our study organism because, 1) they have an aquatic larval stage lasting for up to a year and 2) a reference library for this group is available from Nigeria, making it possible to compare our results from this technique to traditional sampling methods. The results of this study will help to establish a baseline on eDNA sampling in tropical regions as well as provide insights into using eDNA for studying elusive and rare dragonfly species.
