BACKGROUND The many components of conservation through biodiversity development of a large complex tropical wildland, Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG), thrive on knowing what is its biodiversity and natural history. For 32 years a growing team of Costa Rican parataxonomists has conducted biodiversity inventory of ACG caterpillars, their food plants, and their parasitoids. In 2003, DNA barc...

BACKGROUND An intense, 30-year, ongoing biodiversity inventory of Lepidoptera, together with their food plants and parasitoids, is centered on the rearing of wild-caught caterpillars in the 120,000 terrestrial hectares of dry, rain, and cloud forest of Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG) in northwestern Costa Rica. Since 2003, DNA barcoding of all species has aided their identification and di...

Kowiyou Yessoufou*†, T. Jonathan Davies†, Olivier Maurin, Maria Kuzmina, Hanno Schaefer, Michelle van der Bank and Vincent Savolainen African Centre for DNA Barcoding University of Johannesburg, PO Box 524, APK Campus 2006, Johannesburg, South Africa; Department of Biology, McGill University, 1205, Avenue Docteur Penfield, Montreal, QC, Canada; Canadian Centre for DNA Barcoding, University of G...

Assessing the ecological status, a concept implemented in the European Water Framework Directive [EC, 2000. Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council 2000/60/EC establishing a framework for community action in the field of water policy PE-CONS 3639/1/00, p. 72], requires the application of methods capable of distinguishing different levels of ecological quality. The Average Taxono...

Identification of the species origin of pollen has many applications, including assessment of plant-pollinator networks, reconstruction of ancient plant communities, product authentication, allergen monitoring, and forensics. Such applications, however, have previously been limited by microscopy-based identification of pollen, which is slow, has low taxonomic resolution, and has few expert prac...

. Park, M. H., Sim, C. J., Baek, J. & Min, G. S. 2007. Identification of genes suitable for DNA barcoding of morphologically indistinguishable Korean Halichondriidae sponges. Mol. Cells 23:

Oceanic island ecosystems are vulnerable to the introduction of alien species, and they provide a habitat for many endangered species. Knowing the diet of an endangered animal is important for appropriate nature restoration efforts on oceanic islands because introduced species may be a major component of the diets of some endangered species. DNA barcoding techniques together with next-generatio...

A number of methods have been developed to use genetic sequence data to identify and delineate species. Some methods are based on heuristics, such as DNA barcoding which is based on a sequence-distance threshold, while others use Bayesian model comparison under the multispecies coalescent model. Here we use mathematical analysis and computer simulation to demonstrate large differences in statis...