COI Barcode sequences for arthropod species from the high Appalachian Mountains, USA

Developing systematic conservation plans depends on a wealth of information on a region's biodiversity. For 'dark taxa' such as arthropods, such data is usually very incomplete and in most cases left out from assessments.
Sky islands are important and often fragile biodiversity hotspots. Southern Appalachian high-elevation spruce-fir forests represent a particularly threatened sky-island ecosystem, hosting numerous endemic and threatened species, but their arthropods remain understudied.
Here we use voucher-based megabarcoding to explore genetic differentiation among leaf-litter arthropod communities of these highlands, and to examine the extent to which they represent dispersed communities of more or less coherent species, manageable as a distributed unit. We assembled a dataset comprising >6000 COI sequences representing diverse arthropod groups to assess species richness and sharing across peaks and ranges. Comparisons were standardized across taxa using automated species delimita...

制定系统性保护规划，有赖于区域生物多样性的详实海量数据。针对节肢动物（arthropods）这类“隐蔽类群（dark taxa）”，相关数据往往极度匮乏，且在绝大多数评估工作中均被遗漏。
天空岛（sky islands）是兼具重要性与脆弱性的生物多样性热点区域。阿巴拉契亚南部高海拔云杉冷杉林便是一类受严重威胁的天空岛生态系统，孕育了大量特有濒危物种，但针对其中节肢动物的研究仍极为不足。
本研究采用基于凭证标本的宏条形码技术（voucher-based megabarcoding），探究该高地地表凋落物节肢动物群落的遗传分化特征，并分析这些群落在多大程度上可构成物种界定相对统一的弥散种群，进而作为分布式管理单元开展管控。研究团队构建了包含6000余条细胞色素c氧化酶亚基I（COI）序列的数据集，涵盖多样节肢动物类群，以评估不同山峰与区域间的物种丰富度及物种共享情况。研究人员通过自动物种界定方法对不同类群间的比较进行了标准化处理……