Integrative taxonomy for NEON's continental-scale terrestrial insect observations

Background/Question/Methods

NEON is making a variety of terrestrial organismal measurements at the multi-decadal and continental scales. To facilitate this effort, the terrestrial observation team (NEON’s Fundamental Sentinel Unit, FSU) is creating pipelines and tools for data acquisition, processing and analysis. Working closely with professional taxonomists and sequencing facilities, we are building DNA barcode libraries for the focal terrestrial insects, ground beetles and mosquitoes that are found within Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the continental United States. These libraries are being built within an integrative taxonomic framework to unite morphological identifications with DNA barcodes, current distributions and other relevant information (such as guild or native / invasive status for the region). Once the observatory is in full operations NEON will rely heavily on these biodiversity monitoring and assessment tools to seamlessly orchestrate its engagement with the wider taxonomic community, ecologists, curatorial staff at institutions storing NEON-collected voucher specimens and a variety of other users interested in NEON data.

Results/Conclusions

Field-collected and museum-vouchered specimens from NEON’s beetle and mosquito DNA barcoding prototype are serving as catalysts for the development of integrated biodiversity monitoring and assessment tools. Using data from several biodiversity informatics sites (e.g. Global Biodiversity Information Facility) and significant community input, we have begun the creation of taxonomic reconciliation groups for the ~3,000 ground beetle and ~200 mosquito species in NEON’s geographic extent. We anticipate that our efforts will provide the applicable communities a range of tools, including ready descriptions of new species with a total evidence approach (e.g. taxonomists), pictorial identification keys (e.g. ecologists), distribution maps (e.g. curatorial staff) and phenological analyses (e.g. epidemiologists). Further, we envision that these tools will serve as a bridge for a variety of users (e.g. state health professionals and policy makers) to access up-to-date ecological and evolutionary research findings.