Archived natural DNA samplers reveal four decades of biodiversity change across the tree of life
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Detecting the imprints of global environmental change on biological communities is a paramount task for ecological research1,2,3,4. But due to a lack of standardized long-term biomonitoring data, community assembly in the Anthropocene remains poorly understood5,6,7. Novel sources of data for analyzing biodiversity change across time and space are urgently needed8,9. By metabarcoding highly standardized biota samples from a long-term pollution monitoring archive in Germany, we here analyze four decades of community diversity for tens of thousands of species across the tree of life. The samples – tree leaves, marine macroalgae, and marine and limnic mussels – represent natural community DNA samplers10,11, preserving a taxonomically diverse imprint of their associated biodiversity at the time of collection9,12. We find no evidence for localized diversity declines1, but a strong, gradual compositional turnover as a universal pattern of temporal biodiversity change in Germany’s terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems5,13,14. This turnover results in biotic homogenization in terrestrial ecosystems, indicative of country-wide diversity decline. Our work uncovers a massive cryptic biodiversity loss across ecosystems, resulting from out-of-equilibrium ecological dynamics. This highlights the immense promise of alternative sample sources to provide standardized time series data of biodiversity change in the Anthropocene.
