Week 4 reflection
I had a lot of similar feelings/opinions about this paper (using eDNA in SPM) and last weeks paper (comparing seasonality) because they were both proof-of-concept papers. What I find interesting is how everyone in the class responds to the paper differently. What I might find could be improved upon or what I find to be an interesting or important part is normally very different compared to any one other person, and it makes the discussions more valuable to me because of that. The paper overall was well written, and they did support their ideas well, but again there were many things missing that might have made it easier to understand the bigger picture, like why they pooled their samples, for example. It also brought some insight into some methods that we might be able to use in our group project. There was not anything that jumped out to me as significantly interesting, but I did like the figure that showed the abundant species in each area of the river. The biggest issue I had with the paper was that they state that each area of the river had different types of substrate, and that that factor did not affect the survey, but I would have liked if they expanded on that because I would think that substrate type is very important regarding eDNA studies.