CONCLUSIONS
This study highlights the power of haplotype-level community
metabarcoding, enabled by the application of stringent filtering
strategies, for the description of spatial biodiversity patterns of
complex communities in understudied regions (Cyprus) and environments
(soil), overcoming previous limitations of the taxonomic impediment,
low-resolution data and noise due to the presence of spurious sequences.
The wide implementation of harmonised field, lab and bioinformatic
protocols for community metabarcoding of unexplored assemblages will
increase the comparability of datasets from across the globe (Arribas et
al., 2021a), providing the basis for broad-scale analyses of
metacommunity patterns that would enable drawing more general
conclusions on the consistency or context-dependency of ecological
processes across spatial scales and fractions of biodiversity.
Additionally, the ease with which all species in local communities can
be characterised at the population genetic level using metabarcoding
with stringent filtering raises the prospect for modelling demographic
processes for each of the component species (Overcast, Emerson, &
Hickerson, 2019; Overcast et al., 2021). Such an approach has the
potential to elucidate historical and contemporaneous community
responses to environmental heterogeneity and dispersal limitation at a
much finer resolution than the summary statistics currently applied in
whole-community metabarcoding.