Skip to main content
Entomology 2024 Main banner
Bayer Crop Science
Icon Legend
 
Oral Presentation
Oral Presentation
Poster Display
Poster Display
Student Competition
Student Competition
Ticketed Event
Ticketed Event
Back

Section Symposium

Systematics, Evolution, and Biodiversity

Plant-Insect Ecosystems

Arthropod Metabarcoding: A Powerful Tool for Inventorying, Monitoring, and Regenerating Biodiversity

DNA metabarcoding of Hawaiian Arthropoda across temporal scales: Understanding how past disturbances shape present-day ecosystems

Tuesday, November 12, 2024
8:04 AM – 8:19 AM MST
Location: Phoenix Convention Center, 224 B, PCC
Oral Presentation
Understanding why we find different types and numbers of species in different places has been a long-standing question for biologists. Many approaches to capturing biodiversity dynamics are limited to studying a few linages across deep time or many lineages over spatial (and short temporal) scales. By constraining other abiotic and biotic variables, an island chronosequence can provide a natural experiment for examining changes in biodiversity over both extended geological time and present-day perturbations. We collected arthropods associated with native plants across the natural geological age structure of the Hawaiian Islands. We generated DNA metabarcoding libraries from arthropod-plant communities at sites changing over geological timescales (~50yr to 4.15Myr old) and due to recent anthropogenic disturbance. We show how molecular species can be separated into native and non-native introduction status based on DNA sequence characteristics. Equipped with the abundance and ecological status of arthropods in Hawaiian communities we demonstrate how biodiversity changes over geological time and recent time across various levels of biological organization, including genetic distance, alpha-diversity, beta-diversity, and ecological network structure. Together the results indicate that the relative influence of ecological and evolutionary mechanisms varies over time to shape biodiversity. Initially, processes are acting over the short-term to fill empty space in ecologically open communities. Over longer-time scales, ecological processes give way to evolutionary, with diversification of lineages or the splitting of geographic space. This research begins to tease apart the differences between natural and perturbed biological communities and we make inferences about the consequences of ignoring rapidly changing ecosystems.