Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2011;6(8):e18123. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0018123. Epub 2011 Aug 16.
The many components of conservation through biodiversity development of a large complex tropical wildland, Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG), thrive on knowing what is its biodiversity and natural history. For 32 years a growing team of Costa Rican parataxonomists has conducted biodiversity inventory of ACG caterpillars, their food plants, and their parasitoids. In 2003, DNA barcoding was added to the inventory process.
METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We describe some of the salient consequences for the parataxonomists of barcoding becoming part of a field biodiversity inventory process that has centuries of tradition. From the barcoding results, the parataxonomists, as well as other downstream users, gain a more fine-scale and greater understanding of the specimens they find, rear, photograph, database and deliver. The parataxonomists also need to adjust to collecting more specimens of what appear to be the "same species"--cryptic species that cannot be distinguished by eye or even food plant alone--while having to work with the name changes and taxonomic uncertainty that comes with discovering that what looked like one species may be many.
CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: These career parataxonomists, despite their lack of formal higher education, have proven very capable of absorbing and working around the additional complexity and requirements for accuracy and detail that are generated by adding barcoding to the field base of the ACG inventory. In the process, they have also gained a greater understanding of the fine details of phylogeny, relatedness, evolution, and species-packing in their own tropical complex ecosytems. There is no reason to view DNA barcoding as incompatible in any way with tropical biodiversity inventory as conducted by parataxonomists. Their year-round on-site inventory effort lends itself well to the sampling patterns and sample sizes needed to build a thorough barcode library. Furthermore, the biological understanding that comes with barcoding increases the scientific penetrance of biodiversity information, DNA understanding, evolution, and ecology into the communities in which the parataxonomists and their families are resident.
保护生物多样性发展大型复杂热带荒地——瓜纳卡斯特保护区（ACG）的许多组成部分，依赖于了解其生物多样性和自然历史。32 年来，越来越多的哥斯达黎加副分类学家团队一直在对 ACG 毛毛虫、它们的食物植物及其寄生蜂进行生物多样性编目。2003 年，DNA 条形码被添加到编目过程中。
方法/主要发现：我们描述了条形码成为具有数百年传统的实地生物多样性编目过程的一部分，对副分类学家产生的一些显著影响。从条形码结果来看，副分类学家以及其他下游用户对他们发现、饲养、拍照、数据库和提供的标本有了更精细和更深入的了解。副分类学家还需要适应收集更多看起来是“同一物种”的标本——无法通过眼睛甚至仅通过食物植物来区分的隐种，同时还必须应对由于发现看起来是一个物种实际上可能是多个物种而带来的名称更改和分类不确定性。
结论/意义：这些职业副分类学家，尽管缺乏正规的高等教育，但已经证明非常有能力吸收并适应通过向 ACG 编目基础添加条形码而产生的额外复杂性和准确性要求。在此过程中，他们还对热带复杂生态系统中系统发育、亲缘关系、进化和物种组合的细微细节有了更深入的了解。没有理由认为 DNA 条形码以任何方式与副分类学家进行的热带生物多样性编目不兼容。他们全年在现场进行的编目工作非常适合建立全面的条形码库所需的采样模式和样本量。此外，条形码带来的生物学理解增加了生物多样性信息、DNA 理解、进化和生态学在副分类学家及其家人居住的社区中的科学渗透。
