Metabarcoding of soil environmental DNA replicates plant community variation but not specificity

While metabarcoding of plant DNA from their environment is an exciting method that can supplement inventorying live species, the accuracy and specificity has yet to be fully assessed over complex continuous landscapes. In this work, we evaluate community profiles produced via soil by comparing them a morphological survey. We communities in 130 sites along ecological gradients (nutrients, succession, moisture) Denmark using chloroplast trnL region (10–143 bp) primer set compared resulting with longer nuclear ITS2 (~216 found variation observed within survey was well represented molecular surveys, significant correlation both composition richness sets. majority sequences could assigned species (over 80%), had less success (70%), which only possible after restricting reference database local species. conclude highly effective performing large-scale macroecological studies. However, discovery rates taxonomic assignments remained inferior but manual curation databases improves made primers, primers. Finally, suggest greater percentage named diversity would recovered increasing sampling use additional universal