Complementarity of lacustrine pollen and sedimentary DNA in representing vegetation on the central-eastern Tibetan Plateau

Abstract

Plant environmental DNA extracted from lacustrine sediments (sedimentary DNA, sedDNA) has been increasingly used to investigate past vegetation changes and human impacts at a high taxonomic resolution. However, the representation of vegetation communities surrounding the lake is still unclear. In this study, we compared plant sedDNA metabarcoding and pollen assemblages from 27 lake surface-sediment samples collected from alpine meadow on the central-eastern Tibetan Plateau to investigate the representation of sedDNA data. In general, the identified components of sedDNA are consistent with the counted pollen taxa and local plant communities. Relative to pollen identification, sedDNA data have higher taxonomic resolution, thus providing a potential approach for reconstructing past plant diversity. The sedDNA signal is strongly influenced by local plants while rarely affected by exogenous plants. Because of the overrepresentation of local plants and PCR bias, the abundance of sedDNA sequence types is very variable among sites, and should be treated with caution when investigating past vegetation cover and climate based on sedDNA data. Our finding suggests that sedDNA analysis can be a complementary approach for investigating the presence/absence of past plants and history of human land-use with higher taxonomic resolution.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Tibetan Plateau / plant DNA metabarcoding / pollen / lake sediment / plant diversity / vegetation history

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 42071107 and 41877459), the Mobility program of the Sino-German Center for Research Promotion (No. M-0359), the CAS Pioneer Hundred Talents Program (Xianyong Cao), and the Russian Science Foundation (No. 20-17-00110). Cathy Jenks provided help with language editing.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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