A Long-Term Ecological Research Data Set From the Marine Genetic Monitoring Program ARMS-MBON 2018–2020
We established an international Marine Biodiversity Observation Network (ARMS-MBON) combining standardised sampling using autonomous reef monitoring structures (ARMS) with metabarcoding for genetic monitoring of marine hard-bottom benthic communities.
Here, we present the data of our first sampling campaign comprising 56 ARMS units deployed in 2018–2019 and retrieved in 2018–2020 across 15 observatories along the coasts of Europe and adjacent regions. We describe the open-access data set (image, genetic and metadata) and explore the genetic data to show its potential for marine biodiversity monitoring and ecological research. Our analysis shows that ARMS recovered more than 60 eukaryotic phyla capturing diversity of up to ~5500 amplicon sequence variants and ~1800 operational taxonomic units, and up to ~250 and ~50 species per observatory using the cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) and 18S rRNA marker genes, respectively. Further, ARMS detected threatened, vulnerable and non-indigenous species often targeted in biological monitoring.
We show that while deployment duration does not drive diversity estimates, sampling effort and sequencing depth across observatories do.
PEMA was the main software used for the analysis of the ARMS-MBON data.
