Environmental Consequences of Illegal Gold Mining in Coastal Ecosystems: A Case Study of Teluk Sumalata

Nematodes are one of the diverse groups on earth and act as important biological indicator to monitor soil or marine biodiversity. The common method used to characterize soil or marine nematode community is based on microscopic observations of nematode morphology. Such an approach is time-consuming and requires taxonomic experts. So now a days scientists have started using metabarcoding for rapid identification of nematode community. But there are some disadvantages in molecular analysis for species identification also which mainly lie in the incompleteness of online databases used to assign the taxonomical label to a specific DNA sequence and the need to find the right marker for a specific community. After reviewing different works on study of nematode community structure by morphological approach and metabarcoding it can be concluded that no single method is actually suitable for nematode community analysis, rather an integrated approach to species identification based on morphological and molecular analyses will yield a dataset with even greater reliability than based on only one method. Keywords: Nematodes, community structure, identification, metabarcoding, morpho-taxonomy