Taxonomy of Windshield Splatter: Contrasting Geographic Locations using Short Read Counts

How many species inhabit our immediate surrounding? A straightforward collection technique suitable for answering this question is known to anyone who has ever driven a car at highway speeds. The windshield of a moving vehicle is subjected to numerous insect strikes and can be used as a collection device for representative sampling. Combined with next-generation sequencing this approach allows for species identification. Here we describe an application of this methodology to two geographic locations within the Northeastern United States. We identified 61 arthropod and 39 plant species, seven of which showed significant difference in the relative abundance between the two localities. Importantly, we developed a novel robust computational framework for the comparison of relative species abundances between geographic locations, which can be used in other read-count-based applications of next-generation sequencing, such as comparison of expression levels.