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.