Abstract
We use three examples—field and ecology-based inventories in Costa Rica and Papua New Guinea and a museum and taxonomic-based inventory of the moth family Geometridae—to demonstrate the use of DNA barcoding (a short sequence of the mitochondrial COI gene) in biodiversity inventories, from facilitating workflows of identification of freshly collected specimens from the field, to describing the overall diversity of megadiverse taxa from museum collections, and most importantly linking the fresh specimens, the general museum collections and historic type specimens. The process also flushes out unexpected sibling species hiding under long-applied scientific names, thereby clarifying and parsing previously mixed collateral data. The Barcode of Life Database has matured to an essential interactive platform for the multi-authored and multi-process collaboration. The BIN system of creating and tracking DNA sequence-based clusters as proxies for species has become a powerful way around some parts of the ‘taxonomic impediment’, especially in entomology, by providing fast but testable and tractable species hypotheses, tools for visualizing the distribution of those in time and space and an interim naming system for communication.This article is part of the themed issue ‘From DNA barcodes to biomes’.
Highlights
Much has been written on the importance of conserving the world’s biodiversity, and the importance of understanding that diversity by expanding taxonomic knowledge of it, most recently highlighted by Wilson’s [2] proposal to increase the area of natural reserves to half the surface of the Earth, and to accelerate the taxonomic inventory of the Earth’s species
We have spent most of our careers working on biodiversity inventories, all kinds of which have been dramatically changed through addition of the DNA barcoding tool for identifying, discovering and characterizing species, and communicating about them to all users across society
We rapidly found that making identifications of individual species as they were encountered was inefficient, so we undertook two initiatives to understand the Papua New Guinea (PNG) Lepidoptera fauna more systematically through museum collections
Summary
Much has been written on the importance of conserving the world’s biodiversity, and the importance of understanding that diversity by expanding taxonomic knowledge of it, most recently highlighted by Wilson’s [2] proposal to increase the area of natural reserves to half the surface of the Earth, and to accelerate the taxonomic inventory of the Earth’s species. We have spent most of our careers working on biodiversity inventories, all kinds of which have been dramatically changed through addition of the DNA barcoding tool for identifying, discovering and characterizing species, and communicating about them to all users across society. We highlight three ongoing inventories to illustrate how DNA barcoding is contributing to the renaissance of taxonomy [3], while linking species concepts to their ecology. Each essay represents the unique history and context of each project, but they show the transformational nature of DNA barcoding
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