Revealing pattern and process across the diversity of arthropods. Can barcoding help?

Describing and understanding arthropod diversity is a key challenge, with logistical constraints limiting both the taxonomic and geographic scale of investigation. Novel high throughput sequencing approaches are now emerging as powerful tools to overcome such constraints, and thus comprehensively address existing shortfalls in arthropod biodiversity data. At the core of these approaches is the DNA barcode, which provides a universal currency for measuring and comparing arthropod diversity, potentially providing collateral benefits to connect arthropod biodiversity research at a global scale. In this presentation I would like to use some of our work over the last 15 years to make an argument for how a primary focus on barcode data in the analysis of arthropod diversity can be used to reveal pattern and infer process, while also generating testable hypotheses. I would also like to address some of the challenges associated with scaling up through the implementation of metabarcoding, and how these challenges might best be dealt with.