Aim
Here we aim to evaluate the impact of including juveniles of spiders into community diversity estimates. Specifically, we first quantify the additional diversity that immature spiders contribute to diversity estimates. Secondly, we investigate how the inclusion of immature specimens affects biodiversity patterns across communities and identify the possible ecological factors responsible for such patterns. Finally, we assess the ability of metabarcoding to recover abundance information from bulk samples. Our results provide important insights into the relevance of considering all different life stages in rapid biodiversity assessment protocols, which are essential to efficiently monitor ecosystem changes, and will contribute to refine the use of metabarcoding approaches as efficient alternatives to traditional, morphology-based standardised biological inventorying and monitoring schemes.
MATERIAL AND METHODS