NEON is a national-scale research platform for analyzing and understanding the impacts of climate change, land-use change, and invasive species on ecology. NEON features sensor networks and experiments, linked by advanced cyberinfrastructure to record and archive ecological data for at least 30 years. Using standardized protocols and an open data policy, NEON will gather essential data for developing the scientific understanding and theory required to manage ecological challenges. The scaling strategy requires a mixture of human and instrumental measurements.  The Fundamental Sentinel Unit (FSU) is responsible for the field observations and analyses of biological specimens that will provide data on biodiversity, population dynamics, productivity, phenology, infectious disease, and biogeochemistry. The observatory will track patterns in communities including: microbes, plants, insects, birds, and small mammals. The FSU design is intended to reflect the best available science, be compatible with existing programs, be flexible across a range of environmental gradients, and facilitate research across a broad range of areas. To this end, DNA barcode libraries will be developed for a subset of sentinel organisms in order to facilitate species identification.

Results/Conclusions

Here we present the results from NEON’s beetle and mosquito DNA barcoding prototype. In four sites in Colorado (summer, 2009), ground beetles (pitfall traps) and mosquitoes (CO₂-light traps) were collected. We achieved a >90% sequencing success rate for 658 bp bi-directional reads from both beetle and mosquito mitochondrial CO1 genes. These field data support the conclusion that DNA barcoding will serve to optimize biodiversity assessment at NEON’s 60 distributed sites during Observatory operations. We also assessed some museum-archived ground beetle specimens to determine the upper limits of DNA barcoding techniques. These beetles were collected using a variety of methods up to 78 years ago. In the prototype effort, NEON has contributed more than 16 new barcodes and many additional duplicates to existing records in the Barcode of Life Data System. Our ongoing efforts are focused on optimizing data management, specimen labeling, workflows and data QA/QC.