Biodiversity Monitoring in the Musquash Marine Protected Area using Environmental DNA - 2024

We collected water samples from just below the surface in the Musquash Estuary MPA in 2022 for environmental DNA metabarcoding to assess and monitor the biodiversity of the MPA over time. 1L water samples were collected by a Smith-Root sampling pole and vacuum pump from a small vessel and filtered across a 1.2um PES filter in situ. Samples were extracted and sequenced on an Illumina MiSeq platform at the Aquatic Biotechnology Laboratory (Dartmouth, Nova Scotia). FASTQ files were demultiplexed and analyzed through the QIIME2 pipeline and denoised using dada2.This dataset consists of 12S reads targeting fishes, but other markers will be included within this project over time.