Seasonal sampling for freshwater mussel environmental DNA at Bennett Island in the Clinch River, Virginia, USA 2020-2022

We tested eDNA metabarcoding as a monitoring tool to detect freshwater mussel assemblages at the Bennett Island site on the Clinch River. Sampling occurred seasonally from July 2020 through October 2022. We filtered 1L water samples 100 meters upstream and 100 meters downstream of the known mussel assemblage. We amplified and sequenced data at the ND1 and COI markers (Klymus et al., 2021). The goal was to see how well eDNA detected the assemblage across time, sampling in summer (July), late summer (September), fall (October) and winter (December). Sequencing data, in the form of fastQ available on the NCBI sequence read archive (Biosample Accession SAMN53648318 - SAMN53648557) under the Bioproject PRJNA1373263.