<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<export-example>
  <doc>
    <id>36188</id>
    <completedYear/>
    <publishedYear>2025</publishedYear>
    <thesisYearAccepted/>
    <language>eng</language>
    <pageFirst>1034</pageFirst>
    <pageLast>1039</pageLast>
    <pageNumber>6</pageNumber>
    <edition/>
    <issue>7</issue>
    <volume>149</volume>
    <type>articler</type>
    <publisherName>Wiley-VCH</publisherName>
    <publisherPlace>Oxford</publisherPlace>
    <creatingCorporation/>
    <contributingCorporation/>
    <belongsToBibliography>0</belongsToBibliography>
    <completedDate>2025-06-05</completedDate>
    <publishedDate>--</publishedDate>
    <thesisDateAccepted>--</thesisDateAccepted>
    <title language="eng">Estimating required sample sizes for gut content metabarcoding studies of dietary diversity in spiders</title>
    <abstract language="eng">Spiders are dominant predators in terrestrial ecosystems, regulating invertebrate biomass, diversity and abundance through predation. However, analysing predation patterns in the field is challenging, especially as spiders are extra-intestinal liquid feeders and often active at night. Gut content metabarcoding (GCM) provides a cost-effective method to study the prey composition of spiders. In this study, we determine the minimum sample size of spider specimens required to obtain representative estimates of local prey composition. Six common spider species were studied using GCM, and we show that the number of analysed individuals per spider species influenced the sampling completeness for prey at different taxonomic levels. To achieve 90% sampling completeness at the prey species level, between 50 and over 150 individuals per spider species had to be analysed, which is challenging for ecological multi-site studies. Hence, we argue for consideration of coarser taxonomic levels, such as family or order, which often provide sufficient ecological information to understand predator–prey interactions. At these levels, sampling completeness can be achieved with much smaller sample sizes of four to eight individuals per species, making ecological GCM studies more cost-effective. These results highlight the benefits of considering the taxonomic resolution in metabarcoding studies to address ecological research questions. We further provide information that will facilitate future investigations of predator–prey dynamics, not just in spiders but also in other extra-intestinal liquid feeders like, for example, ground beetles.</abstract>
    <parentTitle language="eng">Journal of applied entomology</parentTitle>
    <identifier type="doi">10.1111/jen.13433</identifier>
    <identifier type="issn">1439-0418</identifier>
    <enrichment key="BTU">an der BTU erstellt / created at BTU</enrichment>
    <enrichment key="Publikationsweg">Open Access</enrichment>
    <enrichment key="opus.source">publish</enrichment>
    <licence>Creative Commons - CC BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International</licence>
    <author>
      <firstName>Anja Carina</firstName>
      <lastName>Melcher</lastName>
    </author>
    <submitter>
      <firstName>Linda</firstName>
      <lastName>Wende</lastName>
    </submitter>
    <author>
      <firstName>Henrik</firstName>
      <lastName>Krehenwinkel</lastName>
    </author>
    <author>
      <firstName>Danilo</firstName>
      <lastName>Harms</lastName>
    </author>
    <author>
      <firstName>Klaus</firstName>
      <lastName>Birkhofer</lastName>
    </author>
    <subject>
      <language>eng</language>
      <type>uncontrolled</type>
      <value>Araneae</value>
    </subject>
    <subject>
      <language>eng</language>
      <type>uncontrolled</type>
      <value>Dietary specialisation</value>
    </subject>
    <subject>
      <language>eng</language>
      <type>uncontrolled</type>
      <value>Taxonomic resolution</value>
    </subject>
    <subject>
      <language>eng</language>
      <type>uncontrolled</type>
      <value>Predation dynamics</value>
    </subject>
    <subject>
      <language>eng</language>
      <type>uncontrolled</type>
      <value>Sampling completeness</value>
    </subject>
    <subject>
      <language>eng</language>
      <type>uncontrolled</type>
      <value>Predator-prey interaction</value>
    </subject>
    <collection role="institutes" number="2407">FG Ökologie</collection>
  </doc>
  <doc>
    <id>34435</id>
    <completedYear/>
    <publishedYear>2024</publishedYear>
    <thesisYearAccepted/>
    <language>eng</language>
    <pageFirst>768</pageFirst>
    <pageLast>778</pageLast>
    <pageNumber/>
    <edition/>
    <issue>6</issue>
    <volume>49</volume>
    <type>articler</type>
    <publisherName/>
    <publisherPlace/>
    <creatingCorporation/>
    <contributingCorporation/>
    <belongsToBibliography>0</belongsToBibliography>
    <completedDate>2024-11-04</completedDate>
    <publishedDate>--</publishedDate>
    <thesisDateAccepted>--</thesisDateAccepted>
    <title language="eng">To pool or not to pool : pooled metabarcoding does not affect estimates of prey diversity in spider gut content analysis</title>
    <abstract language="eng">1. Gut content metabarcoding has provided important insights into the food web ecology of spiders, the most dominant terrestrial arthropod predators. In small invertebrates, like spiders, gut content analysis is often performed on whole body DNA extracts of individual predators, from which prey sequences are selectively enriched and sequenced.&#13;
 2. Since many spider species are generalist predators, large numbers of samples comprising individual spider specimens must be analysed to recover an exhaustive image of a spider species' prey spectrum, which is costly and time-consuming.&#13;
 3. Pooled processing of bulk samples of multiple specimens has been suggested to reduce the necessary workload and cost while still recovering a representative estimate of the prey diversity. However, it is still unclear if pooling approaches lead to bias in recovering the prey spectrum and if the results are comparable with data from individually processed spiders.&#13;
 4. Here, we test the effects of metabarcoding pooled spider gut content on the recovered taxonomic diversity and composition of prey. Using a newly adapted primer pair, which efficiently enriches COI barcode sequences of diverse arthropod prey groups while suppressing spider amplification, we test if pooling leads to reduced taxonomic diversity or skewed estimates of prey composition.&#13;
 5. Our results show that pooling and individual processing recover highly correlated taxonomic diversity and composition of prey. The only exception are very rare prey items which were less well recovered by pooling. Our results support pooling as a cost-effective and time-efficient approach to recover the diet of generalist predators for population-level studies of spider trophic interactions.</abstract>
    <parentTitle language="eng">Ecological Entomology</parentTitle>
    <identifier type="doi">10.1111/een.13382</identifier>
    <identifier type="issn">0307-6946</identifier>
    <identifier type="issn">1365-2311</identifier>
    <enrichment key="BTU">an der BTU erstellt / created at BTU</enrichment>
    <enrichment key="Publikationsweg">Open Access</enrichment>
    <enrichment key="opus.source">publish</enrichment>
    <enrichment key="Fprofil">3 Globaler Wandel und Transformationsprozesse / Global Change and Transformation Processes</enrichment>
    <author>
      <firstName>Anja Carina</firstName>
      <lastName>Melcher</lastName>
    </author>
    <submitter>
      <firstName>Linda</firstName>
      <lastName>Wende</lastName>
    </submitter>
    <author>
      <firstName>Sven</firstName>
      <lastName>Weber</lastName>
    </author>
    <author>
      <firstName>Klaus</firstName>
      <lastName>Birkhofer</lastName>
    </author>
    <author>
      <firstName>Danilo</firstName>
      <lastName>Harms</lastName>
    </author>
    <author>
      <firstName>Henrik</firstName>
      <lastName>Krehenwinkel</lastName>
    </author>
    <subject>
      <language>eng</language>
      <type>uncontrolled</type>
      <value>Araneae</value>
    </subject>
    <subject>
      <language>eng</language>
      <type>uncontrolled</type>
      <value>gut content analysis</value>
    </subject>
    <subject>
      <language>eng</language>
      <type>uncontrolled</type>
      <value>metabarcoding</value>
    </subject>
    <subject>
      <language>eng</language>
      <type>uncontrolled</type>
      <value>pooling</value>
    </subject>
    <subject>
      <language>eng</language>
      <type>uncontrolled</type>
      <value>predator–prey interaction</value>
    </subject>
    <subject>
      <language>eng</language>
      <type>uncontrolled</type>
      <value>primer</value>
    </subject>
    <collection role="institutes" number="2407">FG Ökologie</collection>
  </doc>
</export-example>
