Miss Tiahni Bament1, Dr Andy Howe3, Dr Erinn Fagan-Jeffries1,2

1School of Biological Sciences, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia, 2South Australian Museum, Adelaide, Australia, 3Forest Research Institute, University of the Sunshine Coast, Sippy Downs, Australia

Biography:

Tiahni is an honours student in the Invertebrate Systematics and Biodiversity Lab at the University of Adelaide. She has previously completed a bachelor in marine and wildlife conservation and is passionate about insect conservation. Her honours project has focused on building upon the citizen science project Insect Investigators by developing a rapid DNA barcoding pipeline and investigating the impact of the project.

Abstract:

Insect Investigators is a citizen science project aimed at educating school students on the importance of taxonomy and insect biodiversity. In 2022, the program included over 50 schools in three states running a Malaise trap over four weeks and participating in taxonomy workshops. The project was one of the first DNA barcoding projects to be linked from BOLD (the Barcode of Life Database) to the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), a public platform dedicated to biodiversity data. As part of an Honours project, we aimed to determine the impact the project had on increasing the number and diversity of hymenopteran records on ALA. We investigated how the Hymenoptera DNA barcoded from schools compared to the Hymenoptera records already present on ALA prior to Insect Investigators, within a 10km and 100km radius of each school. By comparing two different radii, this project aims to 1) determine whether school participation added previously unrecorded taxa at either species, genus or family level to ALA, and 2) quantify the increase of records of previously recorded taxa. Using these analyses, we determined which schools have contributed the greatest number of previously unrecorded taxa, in hopes this can inform sampling priorities for future projects.