Metabarcoding: opportunities for accelerating monitoring and understanding insect tropical biodiversity

Despite occupying only a small portion of the Earth’s surface, tropical rainforests are some of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet. Given the hyperdiversity of tropical rainforests, these ecosystems are considered essential for the preservation of global biodiversity. However, many of them are located in economically marginalized countries, which frequently suffer from uncontrolled exploitation of their natural resources. In this sense, biodiversity information can help in planning conservation strategies and designing protection measures. Despite this, recording biodiversity is a challenging and time-consuming task that usually requires the involvement of important financial and manpower resources. So, any strategy to facilitate or accelerate this labor could be of significant interest for ecological and conservation purposes. In this review, we highlight why we consider that routinely incorporating metabarcoding strategies can facilitate biodiversity surveillance in tropical rainforests. As insects are key players in tropical ecosystems and are a threatened, hyperdiverse group, here we used them to exemplify the main challenges that the implementation of metabarcoding approaches faces in these complex environments, discussing some methodological obstacles for their implementation. We also emphasize the significant gap between the number of published studies using metabarcoding for biodiversity monitoring in tropical regions with respect to other (often less diverse) regions of the planet. We consider that acknowledging and addressing this disparity will encourage the adoption of these strategies in tropical ecosystems, as these regions are in need—possibly more than any other—of innovative approaches to assess their diversity.