Marine environmental DNA metabarcoding: understanding oceanic islands and mainland sites across anthropogenic gradients in two hemispheres

在2020财年，我们的研究被新冠肺炎推迟了。总之，澳大利亚方面经历了几次封锁，日本对出入境也有严格的限制，使得我们计划在澳大利亚进行的实地工作和邀请研究人员来日本是不可能的。因此，我们采取了务实的路线，订购了实施研究所需的绝大多数设备，包括一个大型生物库速冻和小型真空泵，我们可以在现场使用。我们还与澳大利亚团队举行了多次会议，并计划在2021财年(详细信息如下)，包括在新冠肺炎问题持续存在的情况下的后备计划。最后，我们继续与澳大利亚同行合作，收集从冲绳收集的EDNA数据，并在《科学报告》上发表了一篇科学论文。这项工作很受欢迎，在该杂志2020年下载最多的生态学论文中排名第17位。这项工作研究了冲绳原始和受影响地点的海洋后生动物多样性，显示出受影响较大的地点更多的碎片化和更少的功能冗余。此外，这项工作还指出，由于人为影响而发生更替的大多数海洋类群是研究较少的类群，如海绵、环节动物和其他所谓的“小类群”。

In FY2020, our research was delayed by COVID-19. In short, the Australia side experienced several lockdowns, and Japan also had strict limits on entry and exit, making our planned field work in Australia along with inviting researchers to Japan impossible.Thus, we took a pragmatic course, and ordered the large majority of the equipment needed to implement the research, including a large BioBank deep freezer and small vacuum pumps we can use in the field. We also had numerous meetings with the Australian team, and planned for FY2021 (detailed below), including back-up plans in the case of continued COVID-19 problems.Finally, we continued to collaborate with our Australian counterparts on collected eDNA data from Okinawa, and published a scientific paper in Scientific Reports. This work was well received, and ranks #17 on most downloaded Ecology papers in the journal for 2020. The work examines marine metazoan diversity from eDNA at pristine and impacted sites in Okinawa, showing more fragmentation and less functional redundancy in more impacted sites. As well, the work notes that the majority of marine taxa experiencing turnover due to anthropogenic impacts are less well-studied groups such as sponges, annelids, and other so-called 'minor taxa'.