Upscaling biodiversity monitoring: Metabarcoding estimates 31,846 insect species from Malaise traps across Germany.

ABSTRACT: Mitigating ongoing losses of insects and their key functions (e.g. pollination) requires tracking large-scale and long-term community changes. However, doing so has been hindered by the high diversity of insect species that requires prohibitively high investments of time, funding and taxonomic expertise when addressed with conventional tools. Here, we show that these concerns can be addressed through a comprehensive, scalable and cost-efficient DNA metabarcoding workflow. We use 1815 samples from 75 Malaise traps across Germany from 2019 and 2020 to demonstrate how metabarcoding can be incorporated into large-scale insect monitoring networks for less than 50 € per sample, including supplies, labour and maintenance. We validated the detected species using two publicly available databases (G

SUBMITTER: Buchner D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11646302 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature