Owen S Wangensteen

University of Barcelona | UB · Department of Evolutionary Biology Ecology & Environmental Sciences

Marine sediments are home to one of the richest species pools on Earth, but logistics and a dearth of taxonomic work-force hinders the knowledge of their biodiversity. We characterized α- and β-diversity of deep-sea assemblages from submarine canyons in the western Mediterranean using an environmental DNA metabarcoding. We used a new primer set tar...

Marine hard bottom communities are among the most diverse and complex ecosystems in the Biosphere. Exhaustive biodiversity assessment of these communities has been so far elusive, mainly due to the inability of traditional taxonomy methods for coping with so high diversity and structural complexity. Morphological surveys of these communities are li...

We assessed spatio-temporal patterns of diversity in deep-sea sediment communities using metabarcoding. We chose a recently developed eukaryotic marker based on the v7 region of the 18S rRNA gene. Our study was performed in a submarine canyon and its adjacent slope in the Northwestern Mediterranean Sea, sampled along a depth gradient at two differe...

Metabarcoding is by now a well-established method for biodiversity assessment in terrestrial, freshwater and marine environments. Metabarcoding datasets are usually used for α- and β-diversity estimates, that is, interspecies (or inter-MOTU) patterns. However, the use of hypervariable metabarcoding markers may provide an enormous amount of intraspe...

Estuarine ecosystems are threatened by numerous anthropogenic pressures. Fish assemblages are a dominant component of estuarine macrofauna and serve as indicators for the health of these transitional water ecosystems. Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding is increasingly used to assess the biodiversity of fishes in estuaries. However, there is a n...

With the on-going efforts in digitising museum collections, increased participation of citizen scientists, and greater accessibility to research data, accurately determining global patterns of diversity has become more achievable. Here, we used occurrence records from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, with annotation of authoritative ta...

The black sea urchin (Arbacia lixula) is a keystone species inhabiting the coastal shallow waters of the Mediterranean Sea, which is a key driver of littoral communities' structure. Here, we present the first genome assembly and annotation of this species, standing as the first Arbacioida genome, including both nuclear and mitochondrial genomes. To...

Determine the ecological status of freshwater ecosystem is critical for ensuring ecosystem health and maintaining the services associated to such ecosystems. Freshwater macroinvertebrates respond predictably to environmental disturbances and are widely used in biomonitoring programs for assessing anthropogenic impacts. However, many freshwater spec...

Introduction Currently, Arctic marine ecosystems are witnessing the most rapid physical changes worldwide, leading to shifts in pelagic and benthic communities and food web structure, concomitant with the introduction of boreal species. Gelatinous zooplankton or jellyfish represent one particular group of which several boreal species are prone to u...

Metabarcoding techniques are revolutionizing studies of marine biodiversity. They can be used for monitoring non-indigenous species (NIS) in ports and harbors. However, they are often biased by inconsistent sampling methods and incomplete reference databases. Logistic constraints in ports prompt the development of simple, easy-to-deploy samplers. W...

Metabarcoding is a rapidly developing tool in marine zooplankton ecology, although most zooplankton surveys continue to rely on visual identification for monitoring purposes. We attempted to resolve some of the biases associated with metabarcoding by sequencing a 313-b.p. fragment of the COI gene in 34 “mock” samples from the North Sea which were p...

The Atlantic-Mediterranean marine transition is characterised by strong oceanographic barriers and steep environmental gradients that generally result in connectivity breaks between populations from both basins and may lead to local adaptation. Here, we performed a population genomic study of the black brittle star, Ophiocomina nigra, covering most...

Over the past decades the sampling of environmental DNA (eDNA) - encompassing the DNA of all organisms present in an environmental sample1 - has emerged as a technique for biodiversity monitoring and discovery in a diversity of environments. Avoiding the physical collection and identification of biota, this approach is praised for its independence...

Aim We studied molecular eukaryotic biodiversity patterns in shallow hard‐bottom Antarctic benthic communities using community DNA metabarcoding. Polar ecosystems are extremely exposed to climate change, and benthic macroinvertebrate communities have demonstrated rapid response to a range of natural and anthropogenic pressures. However, these rich...

Environmental DNA (eDNA) has gained popularity as a tool for ecosystem biomonitoring and biodiversity assessment. Although much progress has been made regarding laboratory and fieldwork protocols, the issue of sampling efficiency requires further investigation, particularly in three‐dimensional marine systems. This study focuses on fish community c...

Metabarcoding is a rapidly developing tool in marine zooplankton ecology, although most zooplankton surveys continue to rely on visual identi cation for monitoring purposes. We attempted to resolve some of the biases associated with metabarcoding by sequencing a 313 b.p. fragment of the COI gene in 34 "mock" samples from the North Sea which were pr...

Against the accelerating pace of worldwide species extinction, reliable biodiversity assessments are critical, both as baselines and to track potential declines. DNA metabarcoding techniques allow for fast and comprehensive assessment of biodiversity in both terrestrial and marine habitats. However, these methods need to be adapted and standardised...

Metabarcoding techniques have revolutionized ecological research in recent years, facilitating the differentiation of cryptic species and revealing previously hidden diversity. In the current scenario of climate change and ocean acidification, biodiversity loss is one of the main threats to marine ecosystems. Here, we explored the effects of ocean...

Invasive mammals are responsible for the majority of native species extinctions on islands. While most of these extinction events will be due to novel interactions between species (e.g. exotic predators and naive prey), it is more unusual to find incidences where a newly invasive species causes the decline/extinction of a native species on an islan...

Aim It has been predicted that there should be concordance between biogeographical and phylogeographical processes structuring multi‐species regional assemblages. We hypothesise that oceanographic barriers in the marine environment affect concomitantly the distribution and the connectivity of the marine biota, thus producing congruent biogeographic...

The two congeneric hyperiids Themisto libellula and T. abyssorum provide an important trophic link between lower and higher trophic levels in the rapidly changing Arctic marine ecosystem. These amphipods are characterized by distinct hydrographic affinities and are hence anticipated to be differently impacted by environmental changes, with major co...

The European Alps are highly rich in species, but their future may be threatened by ongoing changes in human land use and climate. Here, we reconstructed vegetation, temperature, human impact and livestock over the past ~12,000 years from Lake Sulsseewli, based on sedimentary ancient plant and mammal DNA, pollen, spores, chironomids, and microcharc...

Aquaculture impacts on marine benthic ecosystems are widely recognized and monitored. However, little is known about the community changes occurring in the water masses surrounding aquaculture sites. In the present study, we studied the eukaryotic communities inside and outside salmonid aquaculture cages through time to assess the community changes...

Epibenthic predators in estuarine shallow soft-bottom environments are generally considered to have broad ecological niches with a wide overlap. This allows them to cope with abundant but highly variable prey communities. The assessment of trophic relationships in shallow soft-bottom habitats is, however, challenging and often complicated by the bi...

Invasive mammals are responsible for the majority of native species extinctions on islands. While most of these extinction events will be due to novel interactions between species (e.g. exotic predators and naive prey), it is more unusual to find incidences where a newly invasive species causes the decline/extinction of a native species on an islan...

Monitoring bacterial communities in a drinking water treatment plant (DWTP) may help to understand their regular operations. Bacterial community dynamics in an advanced full-scale DWTP were analyzed by 16S rRNA metabarcoding, and microbial water quality indicators were determined at nine different stages of potabilization: river water and groundwat...

Although arthropods are the largest component of animal diversity, they are traditionally underrepresented in biological inventories and monitoring programs. However, no biodiversity assessment can be considered informative without including them. Arthropod immature stages are often discarded during sorting, despite frequently representing more tha...

Traditional morphological methods for species identification are highly time consuming, especially for small organisms, such as Foraminifera, a group of shell-building microbial eukaryotes. To analyze large amounts of samples more efficiently, species identification methods have extended to molecular tools in the last few decades. Although a wide r...

DNA metabarcoding is broadly used in biodiversity studies encompassing a wide range of organisms. Erroneous amplicons, generated during amplification and sequencing procedures, constitute one of the major sources of concern for the interpretation of metabarcoding results. Several denoising programs have been implemented to detect and eliminate thes...

Information about the dietary composition of a species is crucial to understanding their position and role in the food web. Increasingly molecular approaches such as DNA-metabarcoding are used in studying trophic relations, not least because they may alleviate problems such as low taxonomic resolution or underestimation of digestible taxa in the di...

Global environmental changes may have a profound impact on ecosystems. In this context, it is crucial to gather biological and ecological information of the main species in marine communities to predict and mitigate potential effects of shifts in their distribution, abundance, and interactions. Using genotyping by sequencing (GBS), we assessed the...

Marine biodiversity underpins ecosystem health and societal well-being. Preservation of biodiversity hotspots is a global challenge. Molecular tools, like DNA barcoding and metabarcoding, hold great potential for biodiversity monitoring, possibly outperforming more traditional taxonomic methods. However, metabarcoding-based biodiversity assessments...

Environmental DNA analysis is rapidly transforming biodiversity monitoring and bolstering conservation applications worldwide. This approach has been assisted by the development of metabarcoding PCR primers that are suited for detection of a wide range of taxa. However, little effort has gone into exploring the value of the non-target DNA sequences...

Although metabarcoding is a well-established tool for describing diversity of pelagic communities, its quantitative value is still controversial, with poor correlations previously reported between organism abundance/biomass and sequence reads. In this study, we explored an enhanced quantitative approach by metabarcoding whole zooplankton communitie...

Because of their challenging taxonomy, arthropods are traditionally underrepresented in biological inventories and monitoring programs. However, arthropods are the largest component of biodiversity, and no assessment can be considered informative without including them. Arthropod immature stages are often discarded during sorting, despite frequentl...

Phyto- and zooplankton in Arctic and sub-Arctic seas show very strong seasonal changes in diversity and biomass. Here we document the seasonal variability in the mesozooplankton community structure in a sub-Arctic fjord in Northern Norway based on monthly sampling between November 2018 and February 2020. We combined traditional morphological zoopla...

DNA metabarcoding is broadly used in biodiversity studies encompassing a wide range of organisms. Erroneous amplicons are generated during amplification and sequencing procedures and constitute one of the major sources of concern for the interpretation of metabarcoding results. Several denoising programs have been implemented to detect and eliminat...

In many species of marine benthic invertebrates, a planktonic larval phase plays a critical role in dispersal. Very little is known about the larval biology of most species, however, in part because species identification has historically been hindered by the microscopic size and morphological similarity among related taxa. This study aimed to dete...

In a recent paper, “Environmental DNA: What's behind the term? Clarifying the terminology and recommendations for its future use in biomonitoring,” Pawlowski et al. argue that the term eDNA should be used to refer to the pool of DNA isolated from environmental samples, as opposed to only extra‐organismal DNA from macro‐organisms. We agree with this...

Background The recent blooming of metabarcoding applications to biodiversity studies comes with some relevant methodological debates. One such issue concerns the treatment of reads by denoising or by clustering methods, which have been wrongly presented as alternatives. It has also been suggested that denoised sequence variants should replace clust...

Animals modify their behaviours and interactions in response to changing environments. In bats, environmental adaptations are reflected in echolocation signalling that is used for navigation, foraging and communication. However, the extent and drivers of echolocation plasticity are not fully understood, hindering our identification of bat species w...

Environmental DNA analysis is rapidly transforming biodiversity monitoring and bolstering conservation applications worldwide. This approach has been assisted by the development of metabarcoding PCR primers that are suited for detection of a wide range of taxa. However, little effort has gone into exploring the value of the non-target DNA sequences...

The recent blooming of metabarcoding applications to biodiversity studies comes with some relevant methodological debates. One such issue concerns the treatment of reads by denoising or by clustering methods, which have been wrongly presented as alternatives. It has also been suggested that denoised sequence variants should replace clusters as the...

Sponges have recently been proposed as ideal candidates to act as natural samplers for environmental DNA due to their efficiency in filtering water. However, validation of the usefulness of DNA recovered from sponges to reveal vertebrate biodiversity patterns in Marine Protected Areas is still needed. Additionally, nothing is known about how differ...

Detailed information of trophic interactions among consumer-resources in food webs is usually limited due to the lack of accurate identification of eaten food resources. The use of DNA-metabarcoding has been proven useful for molecular identification of the numerous taxa present in stomach contents. Here, we characterize the diet and trophic behavi...

We face an increasing global food security challenge as the human population continues to grow across the globe. As agricultural production rises to keep up with food demand, so too does the expansion of crop detrimental pest species. Early detection can be crucial to control their damage and relies on the use of accurate and dependable techniques....

In the marine realm, biomonitoring using eDNA of benthic communities requires destructive direct sampling or the setting-up of settlement structures. Comparatively much less effort is required to sample the water column, which can be accessed remotely. In this study we assess the feasibility of obtaining information from the eukaryotic benthic comm...

Reproductive rates of copepods are temperature-dependent, but poorly known for small copepods at low temperatures, hindering the predictions of population dynamics and secondary production in high-latitude ecosystems. We investigated egg hatching rates, hatching success and egg production of the small copepods Oithona similis and Microsetella norve...

The biodiverse Neotropical ecoregion remains insufficiently assessed, poorly managed, and threatened by unregulated human activities. Novel, rapid and cost-effective DNA-based approaches are valuable to improve understanding of the biological communities and for biomonitoring in remote areas. Here, we evaluate the potential of environmental DNA (eD...

Information about the genomic processes underlying responses to temperature changes is still limited in non‐model marine invertebrates. In this sense, transcriptomic analyses can help to identify genes potentially related to thermal responses. We here investigated, via RNA‐seq, whole‐transcriptomic responses to increased and decreased temperatures...

Among the complex ecosystems and habitats that form the deep sea, submarine canyons and open slope systems are regarded as potential hotspots of biodiversity. We assessed the spatial and temporal patterns of biodiversity in sediment communities of a NW Mediterranean Canyon and its adjacent open slope (Blanes Canyon) with DNA metabarcoding. We sampl...

Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding has revolutionized biomonitoring in both marine and freshwater ecosystems. However, for semi‐aquatic and terrestrial animals, the application of this technique remains relatively untested. We first assess the efficiency of eDNA metabarcoding in detecting semi‐aquatic and terrestrial mammals in natural lotic ec...

The biodiverse Neotropical ecoregion remains insufficiently assessed, poorly managed, and threatened by unregulated human activities. Novel, rapid and cost-effective DNA-based approaches are valuable to improve understanding of the biological communities and for biomonitoring in remote areas. Here, we evaluate the potential of environmental DNA (eD...

Towards an Iberian DNA barcode reference library of freshwater macroinvertebrates and fishes Freshwater macroinvertebrates and fishes are focal groups in major ecosystem biomonitoring programs in the Iberian Peninsula. Yet, their use as bioindicators is sometimes constrained by the time and cost needed for sorting macroinvertebrates specimens and t...

The project Metabarpark set out to achieve three objectives: to compile an exhaustive inventory of the biodiversity in benthic communities of the two National Parks with maritime domains (Cabrera Archipelago and Atlantic Islands of Galicia); to analyse the impact of invasive seaweeds in these communities, and to establish a protocol to apply metaba...

Aim The Atlanto‐Mediterranean edible purple sea urchin, Paracentrotus lividus, is a commercially exploited keystone species in benthic communities. Its browsing activity can deeply modify the littoral landscape, and changes in its abundance are of major conservation concern. This species is facing nowadays contrasting anthropogenic pressures linked...

Metabarcoding is by now a well‐established method for biodiversity assessment in terrestrial, freshwater, and marine environments. Metabarcoding data sets are usually used for α‐ and β‐diversity estimates, that is, interspecies (or inter‐MOTU [molecular operational taxonomic unit]) patterns. However, the use of hypervariable metabarcoding markers m...

Our understanding of marine communities and their functions in an ecosystem relies on the ability to detect and monitor species distributions and abundances. Currently, the use of environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding is increasingly being applied for the rapid assessment and monitoring of aquatic species. Most eDNA metabarcoding studies have eith...