Island Genomic Observatories - a network for island arthropod conservation and broader biodiversity understanding
With strategic implementation, an island Genomic Observatories Network (iGON) has the potential to advance understanding in three areas, the first and more fundamental of which is that of knowledge acquisition and transfer for conservation and sustainable management. Arthropods dominate the native and endemic fractions of island biodiversity, while also representing substantial invasive species risk, but are data deficient compared to vertebrates and plants. HTS barcoding can greatly contribute to knowledge deficits concerning species inventory, species distributions, the geographic structuring of genetic variation within species, and the factors that explain this structure (e.g. Arjona et al., 2022 this issue). With specific regard to islands, the generation of HTS barcode data within an iGON opens the door to improved investigation of fundamental island biogeographic theory using arthropods (e.g. Andújar et al., 2022; Armstrong et al., 2022; Lim et al., 2021 this issue). Finally, island communities can be leveraged to address the recognised need for integration across the disciplines of macroecology and macroevolution, where synthesising data, tools and perspectives is required (McGill et al., 2019). The often simplified and replicated nature of island ecosystems, together with increasingly available technology to characterise the arthropod fractions of their biodiversity, provides a profitable arena for such integration.
To explore the potential of an iGON for the advancement of fundamental and applied biodiversity understanding, we use two recent reviews as a guiding framework, focussed on open questions in island biology (Patiño et al., 2017) and the unification of macroecology and macroevolution (McGill et al., 2019). Within this framework, we identify key themes within which collective and harmonised efforts in HTS arthropod inventory (either in isolation or in concert with other approaches) could yield significant advances in island biodiversity research (see Fig. 1, Table 1). Some of these themes include questions related to basic properties of species diversity of island arthropods, compared to more studied vertebrate groups, while others pertain to fundamental research areas that have been constrained by access to data.