Abstract

Background: Longitudinal connectivity in river systems strongly affects biological components related to ecosystem functioning, thereby playing an important role in shaping local biodiversity and ecosystem health. Environmental DNA (eDNA)-based metabarcoding has an advantage of enabling to sensitively diagnose the presence/absence of species, becoming an efficient/effective approach for studying the community structure of ecosystems. However, little attention has been paid to eDNA-based biomonitoring for river systems, particularly for assessing the river longitudinal connectivity. In this study, by using eDNA we analyzed and compared species diversity and composition among artificial barriers to assess the longitudinal connectivity of the fish community along down-, mid- and upstream in the Hotancheon from the Geum River basin. Moreover, we investigated temporal variation in eDNA fish community structure and species diversity according to season. Results: The results of species detected between eDNA and conventional surveys revealed higher sensitivity for eDNA and 61% of species (23/38) detected in both methods. The results showed that eDNA-based fish community structure differs from down-, mid- and upstream, and species diversity decreased from down to upstream regardless of season. We found that there was generally higher species diversity at the study sites in spring (a total number of species across the sites [n] = 29) than in autumn (n = 27). Nonmetric multidimensional scaling and heatmap analyses further suggest that there was a tendency for community clusters to form in the down-, mid- and upstream, and seasonal variation in the community structure also existed for the sites. Dominant species in the Hotancheon was Rhynchocypris oxycephalus (26.07%) regardless of season, and subdominant species was Nipponocypris koreanus (16.50%) in spring and Odontobutis platycephala (15.73%) in autumn. Artificial barriers appeared to negatively affect the connectivity of some fish species of high mobility. Conclusions: This study attempts to establish a biological monitoring system by highlighting the versatility and power of eDNA metabarcoding in monitoring native fish community and further evaluating the longitudinal connectivity of river ecosystems. The results of this study suggest that eDNA can be applied to identify fish community structure and species diversity in river systems, although some shortcomings remain still need to be resolved.