title: Advancing taxonomy and bioinventories with DNA barcodes.
abstract: We use three examples-field and ecology-based inventories in Costa Rica and Papua New Guinea and a museum and taxonomic-based inventory of the moth family Geometridae-to demonstrate the use of DNA barcoding (a short sequence of the mitochondrial COI gene) in biodiversity inventories, from facilitating workflows of identification of freshly collected specimens from the field, to describing the overall diversity of megadiverse taxa from museum collections, and most importantly linking the fresh specimens, the general museum collections and historic type specimens. The process also flushes out unexpected sibling species hiding under long-applied scientific names, thereby clarifying and parsing previously mixed collateral data. The Barcode of Life Database has matured to an essential interactive platform for the multi-authored and multi-process collaboration. The BIN system of creating and tracking DNA sequence-based clusters as proxies for species has become a powerful way around some parts of the 'taxonomic impediment', especially in entomology, by providing fast but testable and tractable species hypotheses, tools for visualizing the distribution of those in time and space and an interim naming system for communication.This article is part of the themed issue 'From DNA barcodes to biomes'.
authors.affiliation: National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, PO Box 37012, Washington, DC 20013-7012, USA millers@si.edu.
authors.forename: Scott E
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-4138-1378
authors.initials: SE
authors.lastname: Miller
authors.affiliation: SNSB-Zoologische Staatssammlung München, Münchhausenstraße 21, 81247, München, Germany.
authors.forename: Axel
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-0358-9928
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hausmann
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
authors.forename: Winnie
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-5166-809X
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Hallwachs
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
authors.forename: Daniel H
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-7335-5107
authors.initials: DH
authors.lastname: Janzen
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D044822:Biodiversity; D002965:Classification / Q000379:methods*; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources / Q000379:methods*; D003364:Costa Rica; D058893:DNA Barcoding, Taxonomic; D009036:Moths; D010219:Papua New Guinea
keywords: DNA barcoding; Lepidoptera; biodiversity; cytochrome c oxidase I; interim taxonomy