Late Lunch Talk: Assessment of vegetation from soil eDNA metabarcoding: A blast from the past?

With the increased use of soil eDNA metabarcoding for vegetation assessment there is a strong necessity for a better understanding on the spatio-temporal signal of plant eDNA represented in soil samples. Recent efforts revealed that soil samples capture plant eDNA from highly local vegetation, but yet the temporal resolution of plant eDNA remains unexplored. The lack of historical vegetation records that can be compared to vegetation catalogues derived from metabarcoding have inhibited assessment of the temporal signal of plant eDNA. The availability of detailed vegetation records since 1988 from one hundred square metre permanent plots from the Solhomfjell coniferous forest in southern Norway enables the possibility to investigate signals of previous vegetation communities in soil eDNA. Thus, this study aims to address the temporal resolution of plant eDNA in soil samples by cross-checking the taxa retrieved from metabarcoding with the historical records.