Towards holistic insect monitoring by accelerating species discovery, description, and identification using robots, nanopore sequencing, and Artificial Intelligence

Seminar by Prof. Rudolf Meier from Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin
https://www.museumfuernaturkunde.berlin/en/user/2072

Title: Towards holistic insect monitoring by accelerating species discovery, description, and identification using robots, nanopore sequencing, and Artificial Intelligence

Abstract:
Biodiversity science often overlooks hyperdiverse insect clades, despite their critical ecosystem services. To illustrate this, I show that over half of the flying insect diversity in many samples is concentrated within 20 family-level clades, regardless of sampling location. By comparing species richness in bulk samples with the number of described species, I highlight how little is known about these clades, leading to the conclusion that new approaches to species discovery and the taxonomy of “dark taxa” are essential. At the Center for Integrative Biodiversity Discovery at the Natural History Museum Berlin, we envision a future where specimen handling and imaging are largely automated, specimens are sorted into putative species using nanopore barcodes, and species descriptions combine molecular and morphological data in a semi-automated process. I will demonstrate how this approach can transform a "dark taxon" like fungus gnats in the Mycetophilidae family from largely unknown in regions like Singapore to sufficiently well-documented for biomonitoring. Finally, I will discuss how images of common species could then be used to use train AI algorithms for a future where many specimens will be identified by images only.