Building a DNA barcode library of Alaska’s non-marine arthropods

Climate change may result in ecological futures with novel species assemblages, trophic mismatch, and mass extinction. Alaska has a limited taxonomic workforce to address these changes. We are building a DNA barcode library to facilitate a metabarcoding approach to monitoring non-marine arthropods. Working with the Canadian Centre for DNA Barcoding, we obtained DNA barcodes from recently collected and authoritatively identified specimens in the University of Alaska Museum Insect Collection and the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge collection. We submitted tissues from 4,776 specimens, of which 81% yielded DNA barcodes representing 1,662 species and 1,788 BINs, of primarily terrestrial, large-bodied arthropods. This represents 84% of the species available for DNA barcoding in the UAM Insect Collection. There are now 4,020 Alaskan arthropod species represented by DNA barcodes, after including all records in BOLD of species that occur in Alaska â i.e. 48.5% of the 8,277 Alaskan, non-marine-arthropod, named species have associated DNA barcodes. An assessment of the identification power of the library in its current state yielded fewer species-level identifications than expected, but the results were not discouraging. We believe we are the first to deliberately begin development of a DNA barcode library of the entire arthropod fauna for a North American state or province. Although far from complete, this library will become increasingly valuable as more species are added and costs to obtain DNA sequences fall.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author