Farmland Biodiversity Monitoring Using DNA Metabarcoding

Although 5-20% of global crop production is lost to arthropod damage, current biomonitoring programs are extremely limited. This study evaluates the feasibility of using metabarcoding to assess overall insect diversity and detect pest species in agricultural settings. It introduces a curated DNA barcode reference library for Canadian insects that are agricultural pests and applies it to metabarcoding data from the analysis of Malaise trap samples from two experimental farms in Southern Ontario. A total of 7,707 arthropod species were collected across the two farms and projections indicate that another 4,000 await detection. These taxa included 231 registered pest species. The composition of the overall arthropod community composition was more heavily influenced by site location than crop type, but pest species composition was influenced by the crop. This study confirms that metabarcoding enables the evaluation of the species composition of arthropod communities in agroecosystems, allowing pest species to be tracked.