Protist Biodiversity and Biogeography in Lakes From Four Brazilian River-Floodplain Systems

The biodiversity and biogeography of protists inhabiting many ecosystems have been intensely studied using different sequencing approaches, but tropical ecosystems are relatively under-studied. Here, we sampled planktonic waters from 32 lakes associated with four different river-floodplains systems in Brazil, and sequenced the DNA using a metabarcoding approach with general eukaryotic primers. The lakes were dominated by the largely free-living Discoba (mostly the Euglenida), Ciliophora, and Ochrophyta. There was low community similarity between lakes even within the same river-floodplain. The protists inhabiting these floodplain systems comprise part of the large and relatively undiscovered diversity in the tropics.