Advancing taxonomy and bioinventories with DNA barcodes

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'.