[Ela Iwaszkiewicz-Eggebrecht] Insect biodiversity monitoring and discovery with DNA metabarcoding

Dr Ela Iwaszkiewicz-Eggebrecht talks about eDNA metabarcoding methods in insect monitoring.

Part of a symposium "Understanding and monitoring insect diversity: the environmental DNA revolution; Insights from the Insect Biome Atlas" that happened on the 29th of October 2024 at the Swedish Natural History Museum in Stockholm.

Insect diversity science is undergoing transformative changes thanks to the introduction of cheap and effective DNA-based methods (so-called DNA metabarcoding) for species identification. This symposium highlights the new insights into the structure of insect communities generated by these methods and the new opportunities for biodiversity monitoring that they open up! Our focus is on the results generated by the Insect Biome Atlas project - funded by the Knut & Alice Wallenberg Foundation - in which the insect faunas of Sweden and Madagascar and their associated microbiomes were analyzed in some of the most ambitious inventory projects using these methods to date.

Speaker:
Ela Iwaszkiewicz-Eggebrecht is a researcher at the Swedish Museum of
Natural History. Her work focuses on developing and implementing molecular and bioinformatic protocols to describe the insect faunas. Her work involves metabarcoding as well as individual insect barcoding and development of insect abundance quantification methods.