Environmental DNA shotgun sequences: Murray River, Australia, March 2022 and April 2023

Shotgun Illumina NovaSeq6000 sequences were obtained for eDNA extracted from water samples collected from the Murray around the Millewa-Barmah Forest. The dataset comprises a total of 546 giga bases and 1.8 billion paired reads. The aim of the experiment was to assess the feasibility of applying total environmental DNA (eDNA) sequencing for determining distributions, movement and species associations in the environment and how they relate to water use and fish population density. We created this dataset to compare the performance of ultra-deep total eDNA sequencing with PCR amplicon sequencing and direct observational methods for monitoring the abundance and distribution of fishes and other forms of aquatic biodiversity.