Insect diversity science is undergoing transformative changes thanks to the introduction of cheap and effective DNA-based methods (so-called DNA metabarcoding) for species identification. This symposium highlights the new insights into the structure of insect communities generated by these methods and the new opportunities for biodiversity monitoring that they open up! Our focus will be on the results generated by the Insect Biome Atlas project — funded by the Knut & Alice Wallenberg Foundation—in which the insect faunas of Sweden and Madagascar and their associated microbiomes were analyzed in some of the most ambitious inventory projects using these methods to date.
