Low-cost, high-volume imaging for entomological digitization.

Large-scale digitization of natural history collections requires automation of image acquisition and processing. Reflecting this fact, various approaches, some highly sophisticated, have been developed to support imaging of museum specimens. However, most of these systems are complex and expensive, restricting their deployment.

Global arthropod beta-diversity is spatially and temporally structured by latitude.

Global biodiversity gradients are generally expected to reflect greater species replacement closer to the equator. However, empirical validation of global biodiversity gradients largely relies on vertebrates, plants, and other less diverse taxa. Here we assess the temporal and spatial dynamics of global arthropod biodiversity dynamics using a beta-diversity framework.

A workflow for expanding DNA barcode reference libraries through 'museum harvesting' of natural history collections.

Natural history collections are the physical repositories of our knowledge on species, the entities of biodiversity. Making this knowledge accessible to society - through, for example, digitisation or the construction of a validated, global DNA barcode library - is of crucial importance. To this end, we developed and streamlined a workflow for 'museum harvesting' of authoritatively identified Diptera specimens from the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.

Enhancing DNA barcode reference libraries by harvesting terrestrial arthropods at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

The use of DNA barcoding has revolutionised biodiversity science, but its application depends on the existence of comprehensive and reliable reference libraries. For many poorly known taxa, such reference sequences are missing even at higher-level taxonomic scales. We harvested the collections of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (USNM) to generate DNA barcoding sequences for genera of terrestrial arthropods previously not recorded in one or more major public sequence databases.

A reference library for Canadian invertebrates with 1.5 million barcodes, voucher specimens, and DNA samples.

The reliable taxonomic identification of organisms through DNA sequence data requires a well parameterized library of curated reference sequences. However, it is estimated that just 15% of described animal species are represented in public sequence repositories. To begin to address this deficiency, we provide DNA barcodes for 1,500,003 animal specimens collected from 23 terrestrial and aquatic ecozones at sites across Canada, a nation that comprises 7% of the planet's land surface.

A DNA 'barcode blitz': rapid digitization and sequencing of a natural history collection.

DNA barcoding protocols require the linkage of each sequence record to a voucher specimen that has, whenever possible, been authoritatively identified. Natural history collections would seem an ideal resource for barcode library construction, but they have never seen large-scale analysis because of concerns linked to DNA degradation. The present study examines the strength of this barrier, carrying out a comprehensive analysis of moth and butterfly (Lepidoptera) species in the Australian National Insect Collection.