Development of a Rapid Molecular Biodiversity Assessment using parasitic wasps from Z02 canopy fogging
Within Z02 “Monitoring of aboveground animal diversity”, samples of arboreal arthropods have been collected via canopy fogging in the dry season of 2013, the rainy season of 2013/2014 and again in dry season of 2017. From among those samples, we identified several focus groups to work in more detail. Apart from ants (Formicidae), we identified six families of parasitic wasps from the Hymenoptera for further analysis, i.e. the Braconidae, Ceraphronidae, Encyrtidae, Eulophidae, Platygastridae and Scelionidae. Around 15.000 individuals of these six families were sorted to more than 1.100 morphospecies. The aim of the project is to (1) verify the sorting to morphospecies of samples from the aforementioned six Hymenoptera families by molecular means (DNA barcoding) and to (2) establish a fast and cost‐effective molecular method to estimate biodiversity using the same samples as calibration.
