Korean Journal of Agricultural Science ISSN:2466-2402(Print) 2466-2410(Online) 농업과학연구

The paddy environment is classified as a wetland and occupies a very large proportion of the freshwater environment. It is also ecologically important as a habitat and spawning ground for many aquatic insects and amphibian larvae. However, due to climate change and indiscriminate spraying of pesticides, the rice field ecosystem is continuously threatened. In order to restore ecologically damaged rice paddies in the future, information on organisms living in the rice paddy ecosystem, which can serve as a restoration standard, is needed. The eDNA metabarcoding analysis method is a very effective means of accumulating information on many organisms living in the rice field ecosystem because it can indirectly identify the existence of taxa that are no longer found in the target ecosystem due to different adult life periods or metamorphosis. In this study, genes of four species of frogs and nine species of aquatic insects were also discovered, and some taxa were directly discovered in the field. A large number of taxa have been discovered only by DNA searches, and traditional survey methods have only been able to identify very limited taxa. This eDNA-based paddy field biosearch is expected to be very useful in the investigation of biodiversity in agricultural ecosystems due to its strong analytical resolution.