Fig 1.
Map showing the sites used for the dietary metabarcoding analysis (Syferkuil and Welverdiend), and collection of plant material (Timbavati, Nkuhlu and Welverdiend) were used for the extraction of POSA species lists.
The map was generated in ArcMap 10.8.1 by W. Muller using open-source shapefiles (SANBI (2012) [56], Municipal Demarcation Board [57] and the National Geographic Society [58]).
Fig 2.
The composition of the final DNA sequence reference database in terms of the number of genera (histogram) and species (line plot) per family.
Fig 3.
Scatterplots of the Barcode gap s for species present (A) in the rbcL dataset and (B) trnL dataset. Scatterplots show the relationships between minimum interspecific distance (y-axis) and maximum intraspecific distance (x-axis) where the barcode gap is indicated by points falling above the 1:1 slope. High densities of plots are indicated by the darker colours.
Table 1.
Discriminatory power of the rbcL and trnL reference datasets predicted by the application of three distance-based measures: Nearest neighbour, Meier’s best close match, as well as BOLD identification criterion, for both default and optimized thresholds for the inclusion and exclusion of singletons for the respective datasets.
All three analyses were performed to identify queries within the respective identification thresholds to genus level.