community assembly for local moths

How insect communities are assembled in nature remains largely unknown. In particular, whether habitat filtering or competition serves as the main mechanism in forming insect communities is rarely subject to an in-depth investigation. One bottleneck lies in the difficulty of species identification when dealing with a large number of diverse insects. However, High-Throughput Sequencing (HTS) technology coupled with classic DNA barcoding offers a great opportunity to infer community assembly for this speciose group. In this study, we try to compare the full-length metabarcoding method (SOAPBarcode) to Sanger sequencing and evaluate its performance on inferring community assembly.