Rainfall has contrasting effects on aquatic and terrestrial environmental DNA recovered from streams

Abstract

Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding is increasingly applied to a variety of questions and challenges across basic and applied ecology. Although streams and rivers (i.e., lotic ecosystems) can serve as conveyor belts of both aquatic and terrestrial eDNA from upstream or riparian areas, precipitation can dilute eDNA due to increasing discharge and/or mobilize eDNA into rivers from adjacent terrestrial ecosystems. Previous research has examined eDNA detectability of single species after high flow events, but no studies have compared aquatic and terrestrial communities recovered by eDNA metabarcoding together in response to rainfall. For this study, we used eDNA metabarcoding to sample three rivers before and after precipitation over six sampling events to evaluate if terrestrial eDNA exhibits a mobilization effect and aquatic eDNA exhibits a dilution effect after rainfall. We found that as rainfall increased, terrestrial taxa richness significantly increased and aquatic taxa richness decreased but not significantly. As such, researchers using eDNA metabarcoding from lotic ecosystems to characterize terrestrial communities might not need to avoid, and could even seek out, precipitation events in their sampling design. However, our study should be replicated over more lotic ecosystems and ecoregions and larger gradients of precipitation events.