Figures legends
Figure 1. Area of eDNA and UVC surveys along the southern coast of Curaçao. The main sampling areas were the coastal stretch of Valentijnsbaai in the more remote northern part of the island and the coastal stretch along the main city of Willemstad in proximity to industrial and other anthropogenic activities.
Figure 2. Spider plots of indices, richness accumulation curves and boxplot of beta diversity showing the comparison between both the Willemstad (purple) and Valentijnsbaai (green) sampling sites. The first column (a) shows the community-level weighted means of trait values (TL: Trophic Level; BS: Body Size), the taxa richness accumulation curves and the taxonomic 𝛽 dissimilarity. The second column (b) shows the main functional diversity indicators (FRic: functional richness; Fdiv: functional divergence; Fori: functional originality; Fspe: functional specialisation; TR: taxa richness), the functional richness accumulation curves and the functional 𝛽 dissimilarity. The third column (c) shows the main phylogenetic indicators (PD: phylogenetic diversity; MPD: Mean Pairwise Distance; VPD: Variance of the Pairwise Distance ;MNTD: Mean Nearest Taxonomic Distance; VNTD: Variance of the Nearest Taxonomic Distance), the phylogenetic richness accumulation curves and the phylogenetic dissimilarity.
Figure 3. Compositional differences (PCoA) (a) from the presence absence matrix between the eDNA samples (b) and from the UVC transects between both the Willemstad (purple) and Valentijnsbaai (green) areas. The maps indicate the geographic positions of the samples with the corresponding colours.
Figure 4. Individual species responses to the coastal area, where positive coefficient indicate greater signal of occupancy in Valentijnsbaai compared with Willemstadt. Upper panels related to species responses revealed through eDNA metabarcoding (a), whereas lower panels indicate species responses revealed through UVC transects (b). Uncertainty in the estimated species parameters with eDNA, UVC with the same number of samples as eDNA and UVC with all samples is provided (c).