Wild ramp visitors: Assessing the arthropod community of an emblematic Appalachian species using eDNA.

Ramps (Allium tricoccum Ait.) are popular spring ephemerals in Eastern North America due to their pungent, garlicky taste. Despite their popularity, little is known about their life-history traits, including what insects visit and potentially pollinate their flowers. Monitoring communities of arthropods is challenging, mainly because they are time-consuming and highly dependent on taxonomic expertise. Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding allows for faster and non-lethal surveys of these communities as it amplifies the traces of DNA left by arthropods when visiting the plants. For this study, we collected 48 ramp umbels in two localities, Grafton WV, and Bolivar PA, in the summers of 2021 and 2023. We performed eDNA barcoding on these samples using the universal animal barcode, the cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI). We obtained eDNA representing 18 arthropod orders, including 83 families, and 90 genera, from different ecological groups such as pollinators, predators, parasitoids, and phytophagous species. Overall, our study shows eDNA as a viable and valuable tool to assess arthropod communities of wildflowers and provides information on the life-history traits of an emblematic species in Appalachian culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]