Integrating quantitative morphological and qualitative molecular methods to analyze soil nematode community responses to plant range expansion

Nematodes were extracted from soils of a range expanding and related plant species in the native region of both and the expanded region of the range expanding plant species. we then identified half of the extracted nematodes morphologically and extracted DNA from the other half to apply qPCR with groups specific primers and high throughput amplicon sequencing (HTS). The aim was to compare the methods which overall showed strong correlations. However, different methods had distinct strengths (e.g. providing absolute abundances for morphology, the ease of specific quantification of nematode groups for qPCR and the high resolution of all nematode taxa simultaneously for HTS). Therefore we propose a method combination for in depths studies of soil nematode communities.