Metabarpark comes to an end

Dear followers of the Metabarpark project, please be aware that the project ended officially in November 2017. We have waited to make this post so that some papers with results could appear and a new project is up and running.

We are proud of the success of the Metabarpark project. We could develop novel metabarcoding methods for the assessment of benthic communities on hard substrata. These methods were applied to representative communities of the two National Parks studied, and a bewildering biodiversity was uncovered. We also proved the adequacy of metabarcoding to detect the less evident impacts (on meio- and micro-organisms) of the presence of invasive seaweeds in sublittoral communities in both Parks.

We are happy to announce that our activity will continue in the framework of a new project funded by the Ministry of Science, the PopCOmics project. In this new project, we seek to continue the development of molecular tools as applied to ecological and conservation issues.

Thanks for having followed this project! Please bookmark the webpage of PopCOmics http://popcomicsproject.blogspot.com/ and watch out for interesting news.

The Metabarpark team

Results from Metabarpark published!

The paper with the main results of the Metabarpark project has been published in the international journal PeerJ. It is open access and freely accesible at:

https://peerj.com/articles/4705/

It took us a while to get it published, but we hope that the scientific community will appreciate these results and the new application of metabarcoding techniques to natural benthic communities.

The article is dedicated to Alex Macía, owner of the Cíes Diving club, who provided logistics in the Atlantic Islands, and who recently died while following his passion for diving.

The supplementary material of the article includes the updated MOTU tables that summarize the biodiversity found in the two National Parks during our samplings.

Venn diagrams showing the number of different taxa recovered with 18S (blue) or COI (red) at different taxonomic ranks.