Biodiversity and distribution of zoobenthos in the ecological water replenishment area of the Yellow River estuary coastal wetland revealed by eDNA metabarcoding

Statistical analysis reveals significant differences in diversity among all salinity groups. The low salinity condition exhibits a relatively high median diversity, indicating a rich variety of zoo- benthic species. In contrast, the median salinity condition has the lowest median diversity, sug- gesting that intermediate salinity levels are associated with reduced species diversity. The high salinity condition shows the highest diversity, indicating that extreme salinity levels, particu- larly high salinity, support a greater variety of zoobenthic organisms. The ecological network relationships between complex environmental factors and various zoobenthic genera is presented in Fig 4 The nodes represent environmental factors (yellow) or benthic animal genera (gray), and the edges (lines connecting the nodes) depict the interac- tions between them. Red lines denote positive correlations, whereas blue lines indicate nega- tive correlations. The thickness of the lines reflects the strength of these relationships. Key environmental factors such as Ca2⁺, Na⁺, TOC, and pH exhibit numerous strong correlations Fig 3. RDA analysis illustrating the relative abundance of zoobenthic families at each sampling site in relation to environmental factors (A). Scatter plots showing the prediction of environmental variable importance using random forests (B). β-diversity (C) and α-diversity (D) of zoobenthic communities among samples with varying salinity. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0315346.g003 PLOS ONE

Biodiversity and zoobenthos distribution in yellow river estuary wetlands revealed by eDNA metabarcoding PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0315346 December 18, 2024 9 / 19