Abstract

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.