Abstract Conservation and management of marine biodiversity depends on biomonitoring of marine habitats, but current approaches are resource‐intensive and require different approaches for different organisms. Environmental DNA (eDNA) extracted from water samples is an efficient and versatile approach to detecting aquatic animals. In the ocean, eDNA composition reflects local fauna at fine spatial scales, but little is known about the effectiveness of eDNA‐based monitoring of marine communities at larger scales. We investigated the potential of eDNA to characterize and distinguish marine communities at large spatial scales by comparing vertebrate species composition among marine habitats in Qatar, the Arabian Gulf (also known as the Persian Gulf), based on eDNA metabarcoding of seawater samples. We conducted species accumulation analyses to estimate how much of the vertebrate diversity we detected. We obtained eDNA sequences from a diverse assemblage of marine vertebrates, spanning 191 taxa in 73 families. These included rare and endangered species and covered 36% of the bony fish genera previously recorded in the Gulf. Sites of similar habitat type were also similar in eDNA composition. The species accumulation analyses showed that the number of sample replicates was insufficient for some sampling sites but suggested that a few hundred eDNA samples could potentially capture >90% of the marine vertebrate diversity in the study area. Our results confirm that seawater samples contain habitat‐characteristic molecular signatures and that eDNA monitoring can efficiently cover vertebrate diversity at scales relevant to national and regional conservation and management.

中文翻译：

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使用来自海水的脊椎动物环境 DNA 进行海洋栖息地的生物监测

摘要 海洋生物多样性的保护和管理依赖于海洋栖息地的生物监测，但目前的方法是资源密集型的，需要针对不同的生物采取不同的方法。从水样中提取的环境 DNA (eDNA) 是一种检测水生动物的有效且通用的方法。在海洋中，eDNA 组成反映了精细空间尺度上的当地动物群，但人们对基于 eDNA 的更大尺度海洋群落监测的有效性知之甚少。我们基于海水样本的 eDNA 元条形码，通过比较卡塔尔、阿拉伯湾（也称为波斯湾）海洋栖息地的脊椎动物物种组成，研究了 eDNA 在大空间尺度上表征和区分海洋群落的潜力。我们进行了物种积累分析，以估计我们检测到的脊椎动物多样性。我们从不同的海洋脊椎动物组合中获得了 eDNA 序列，这些组合跨越 73 个科的 191 个分类群。这些包括稀有和濒危物种，涵盖了先前在海湾地区记录的 36% 的硬骨鱼属。类似栖息地类型的地点在 eDNA 组成上也相似。物种积累分析表明，某些采样点的样本重复数量不足，但表明几百个 eDNA 样本可能捕获研究区域内 > 90% 的海洋脊椎动物多样性。