ArticleMolecular ecology resources2025
Upscaling biodiversity monitoring: Metabarcoding estimates 31,846 insect species from Malaise traps across Germany.
Article in Molecular ecology resources, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Species identification, discovery, and biomonitoring: Strategic priorities for DNA barcoding in Europe, set in a global context.Bioscience · 2026Article
- Comparison of Environmental DNA and Bulk DNA Metabarcoding for Assessing Terrestrial Arthropod Diversity Across Three Habitat Types on Guam.Molecular ecology resources · 2026Article
- Assessing the temporal dynamics of airborne insect communities through DNA metabarcoding of aerial trap catches.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Combining Time-Stamped Insect Sampling With eDNA-Metabarcoding of Guano to Reconstruct Community Interactions.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Spatial overlap and temporal synchrony between guilds of insect hosts and parasitoids.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Article
- Accuracy of occurrence and abundance estimates from insect metabarcoding.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- A Regional DNA Barcode Library for Northern Rocky Mountain Arthropods to Support Biodiversity and Molecular Ecological Research.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Performance and Limitations of Out-Of-Distribution Detection for Insect DNA Barcoding.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Distance-decay reveals contrasting effects of land-use types on arthropod community homogenisation.Nature communications · 2026Article
- 16S rRNA sequence dataset for the identification of the French hoverflies (Diptera, Syrphidae).Biodiversity data journal · 2026Article
- Article
- Unknown Germany - An integrative biodiversity discovery program.npj biodiversity · 2025Review
- HAPP: High-accuracy pipeline for processing deep metabarcoding data.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- A DNA Barcode Inventory of Austrian Dragonfly and Damselfly (Insecta: Odonata) Species.Insects · 2025Article
- Effects of land cover and protected areas on flying insect diversity.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2025Article
- Are Findings of Key Insect Metrics Generalizable Across Different Taxa in Malaise Trap Samples?Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- First national survey of terrestrial biodiversity using airborne eDNA.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Data of the Insect Biome Atlas: a metabarcoding survey of the terrestrial arthropods of Sweden and Madagascar.Scientific data · 2025Article
- A shortcut to sample coverage standardization in metabarcoding data provides new insights into land-use effects on insect diversity.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Robot-Aided Measurement of Insect Diversity on Vegetation Using Environmental DNA.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
26 authors.
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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 (GBOL and GBIF) and the judgement of taxonomic experts. With an average of 1.4 M sequence reads per sample we uncovered 10,803 validated insect species, of which 83.9% were represented by a single Operational Taxonomic Unit (OTU). We estimated another 21,043 plausible species, which we argue either lack a reference barcode or are undescribed. The total of 31,846 species is similar to the number of insect species known for Germany (~35,500). Because Malaise traps capture only a subset of insects, our approach identified many species likely unknown from Germany or new to science. Our reproducible workflow (~80% OTU-similarity among years) provides a blueprint for large-scale biodiversity monitoring of insects and other biodiversity components in near real time.
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