High throughput barcode sequencing of arthropods at scale
Open questions in island biology arArthropods offer high potential for
structured sampling to obtain data-rich site-based community data,
through the use of multiple complementary sampling methods (Montgomery,
Belitz, Guralnick, & Tingley, 2021). For nearly all sampling methods,
sorting of samples and classification to species are likely to be
substantial challenges, and thus a limitation to sampling at scale. For
many groups, regional taxonomic knowledge is incomplete, and for those
groups that benefit from a robust taxonomic framework, sorting and
species assignment may still be complicated by a lack of specific
taxonomic expertise. Molecular barcode-based sequencing tools have
already helped to overcome the challenges of taxonomic assignment and
facilitate new species discovery and monitoring (e.g. deWaard et al.,
2019; Hebert, Cywinska, Ball, & DeWaard, 2003; Ronquist et al., 2020),
and there are broader benefits for the characterisation of diverse
arthropod communities using high throughput sequencing (HTS) barcoding
(Hajibabaei, Baird, Fahner, Beiko, & Golding, 2016). HTS can be
employed at the scale of individual specimens or bulk community samples
(see Kennedy et al. (2020) and sections below), and both can greatly
reduce existing limitations for identifying and understanding
biodiversity patterns and processes across entire arthropod assemblages
on islands. Additionally, even in the absence of a local reference
library, when HTS barcoding is coupled with the use of the universal
mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) barcode region (Andújar, Arribas, Yu, Vogler,
& Emerson, 2018), taxonomic assignment is aided by the more than eight
million barcode sequences within the BOLD repository.