Data from: Biodiversity soup: metabarcoding of arthropods for rapid biodiversity assessment and biomonitoring

1) Traditional biodiversity assessment is costly in time, money, and
taxonomic expertise. Moreover, data are frequently collected in ways (e.g.
visual bird lists) that are unsuitable for auditing by neutral parties,
which is necessary for dispute resolution. 2) We present protocols for the
extraction of ecological, taxonomic and phylogenetic information from bulk
samples of arthropods. The protocols combine mass trapping of arthropods,
mass-PCR amplification of the COI barcode gene, pyrosequencing, and
bioinformatic analysis, which together we call ‘metabarcoding.’ 3) We
construct seven communities of arthropods (mostly insects) and show that
it is possible to recover a substantial proportion of the original
taxonomic information. We further demonstrate, for the first time, that
metabarcoding allows for the precise estimation of pairwise community
dissimilarity (beta diversity) and within-community phylogenetic diversity
(alpha diversity), despite the inevitable loss of taxonomic information
inherent to metabarcoding. 4) Alpha and beta diversity metrics are the raw
materials of ecology and the environmental sciences, facilitating
assessment of the state of the environment with a broad and efficient
measure of biodiversity.