AMMOD

Biodiversity is continuously changing, especially influenced by human activities and climate. At the moment, this can only be observed patchily, selectively and manually for some groups of organisms, as continuous, automated monitoring stations are lacking. We are building prototypes of the "Weather Station for Biodiversity". The AMMOD project brings together and adapts novel techniques to record biodiversity in analogy to weather stations. The following technologies will be used for this purpose:

• Automatic sampling of flying insects, pollen and spores for identification with DNA barcoding (using metabarcoding, e.g. pollen metabarcoding).
• Automatic image recognition of birds, nocturnal insects ("moth scanner") and mammals
• Automatic bioacoustic identification (of birds, bats, crickets, etc.)
• Automatic analysis of scents in the landscape ("smell scapes")
• Development of data flows, data archiving, data access, visualizations, analysis methods

We analyze wind pollen using automated wind pollen traps. Furthermore, we examine plant traces in the malaise traps to identify at which times of the year which insects visit which plants. The analyses are performed using DNA metabarcoding methods and NGS sequencing.

Kolter A, Gemeinholzer B (2020): Plant DNA barcoding necessitates marker-specific efforts to establish more comprehensive reference databases, Genome https://doi.org/10.1139/gen-2019-0198

Keller A, Hohlfeld S, Kolter A, Schultz J, Gemeinholzer B, Ankenbrand M (2020): BCdatabaser: on-the-fly reference database creation for (meta-)barcoding, Bioinformatics, btz960, https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btz960

Swenson SJ, Wissemann V, Gemeinholzer B (2016): Developing Standards for Pollen Metabarcoding, Barcode Bulletin 7(4): 2-4.