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