BIODIVERSITY MONITORING OF SINGAPORE’S COASTAL MARINE METAZOAN COMMUNITIES USING ENVIRONMENTAL DNA METABARCODING

Abstract

In this study, we focus our surveys on marine metazoans as a biodiverse group under severe threat due to climate and other anthropogenic changes. We utilised a combination of markers (universal COI and marine vertebrate 16S rRNA) to recover a more comprehensive suite of marine metazoans present at four coastal sites in Singapore. The recently developed marine vertebrate 16S marker had hitherto not been tested in situ and we further determined a suitable species delimitation threshold to estimate the number of tentative species present in our samples. Long-term multi-taxon ecological studies in the marine environment are uncommon, and the majority of eDNA surveys—including the above analysis of four coastal sites—are snapshots of the environment that cannot be used to detect biotic change over time. This thesis further investigated the biodiversity at the same four coastal sites over the course of a year by using the complementary molecular markers.