DOI: 10.5061/dryad.79cnp5j2c
title: Data from: Plant-derived environmental DNA complements diversity estimates from traditional arthropod monitoring methods but outperforms them detecting plant-arthropod interactions

description: Our limited knowledge about the ecological drivers of global arthropod
 decline highlights the urgent need for more effective biodiversity
 monitoring approaches. Monitoring of arthropods is commonly performed
 using passive trapping devices, which reliably recover diverse
 communities, but provide little ecological information on the sampled
 taxa. Especially the manifold interactions of arthropods with plants are
 barely understood. A promising strategy to overcome this shortfall is
 environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding from plant material on which
 arthropods have left DNA traces through direct or indirect interactions.
 However, the accuracy of this approach has not been sufficiently tested.
 In four experiments, we exhaustively test the comparative performance of
 plant-derived eDNA from surface washes of plants and homogenized plant
 material against traditional monitoring approaches. We show that the
 recovered communities of plant-derived eDNA and traditional approaches
 only partly overlap, with eDNA recovering various additional taxa. This
 suggests eDNA as a useful complementary tool to traditional monitoring.
 Despite the differences in recovered taxa, estimates of community α- and
 β-diversity between both approaches are well correlated, highlighting the
 utility of eDNA as a broad scale tool for community monitoring. Last, eDNA
 outperforms traditional approaches in the recovery of plant-specific
 arthropod communities. Unlike traditional monitoring, eDNA revealed
 fine-scaled community differentiation between individual plants and even
 within plant compartments. Especially specialized herbivores are better
 recovered with eDNA. Our results highlight the value of plant derived eDNA
 analysis for large-scale biodiversity assessments that include information
 about community level interactions.
description: # Dataset - Plant-derived environmental DNA complements diversity
 estimates from traditional arthropod monitoring methods but outperforms
 them detecting plant-arthropod interactions
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.79cnp5j2c](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.79cnp5j2c) This dataset was used to create the manuscript of "Sven Weber, Manuel Stothut, Lisa Mahla, et al. Plant-derived environmental DNA complements diversity estimates from traditional arthropod monitoring methods but outperforms them detecting plant-arthropod interactions", which at the moment publication of data is available at authorea under DOI: [10.22541/au.168658036.68835439/v1](https://doi.org/10.22541/au.168658036.68835439/v1). The excel sheet Kimmlingen\_data\_raw\_raff\_tax\_meta includes all raw OTUs resulting from the sequence processing (sheets: OTU\_traps\_raw, OTU\_plants\_raw), rarefied OTU tables (sheet: OTU\_rarefied), the taxonomic annotation of the OTUs (sheet: tax\_annotation) and the meta table (sheet: meta) used for the analysis of experiments 1 - 3. The excel sheet Trier\_data\_raw\_raff\_tax\_meta includes all raw OTUs resulting from the sequence processing (sheets: OTU\_raw), rarefied OTU tables (sheet: OTU\_rarefied), the taxonomic annotation of the OTUs (sheet: tax\_annotation) and the meta table (sheet: meta) used for the analysis of experiment 4. The filtering steps and statistiacal analysis are understandable in connection with the text and figures of the manuscript and supplementary information. Any missing data was named "NA" , which occures in the taxonomic annotation and the metatable, as no meaningful entry could be made here Description of meta table columns: Kimmlingen\_data\_raw\_raff\_tax\_meta, sheet = meta Sample\_ID: Unique identification of each sample we took method: In this case this discriminates plant-derived eDNA from bulk samples of whole arthropod orgaisms by traditional methods sweep netting, Malaise traps und Pitfall traps. subset: Discriminates the hedge and grassland are we sampled at the Kimmlingen site. See figure S9 of the Supplementary information of the paper. cat: Descriminates diffrent approaches used under each method. species\_full: This shows the plant species scientific names if the row included a plant. plant\_compartment: Descriminates the compartment of each given plant. eDNA\_beating\_equivalent: For each vegetation beating sample the equivalent eDNA sample is given, since we samlped the same plant individuals for both methods. Trier\_data\_raw\_raff\_tax\_meta, sheet = meta Sample\_ID: Unique identification of each sample we took species\_full: This shows the plant species scientific names if the row included a plant. plant\_compartment: Descriminates the compartment of each given plant. site: Shows the diffrent parent sites. method: In this case this discriminates plant-derived eDNA (water washes or plant material homogenization) from bulk samples of whole arthropod orgaisms by the traditional method sweep netting. cat: Descriminates diffrent approaches used under each method. experiment: Number of experiment from the text and reference to samples used in figurte S9. All samples for figure s( of the Supplementary information are reproduced isolations and PCRs to validate the data. site\_name: Name of each specific site. habitat: Habitat type of each site. figure\_s9: Name of the site in the figure S9. The dataset also includes the fastq files which can be used to recreate the sequence processing steps. The first two sections of the fastq file title can be related to the meta tables.