Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The current biodiversity crisis is a global phenomenon, and certain regions such as the arctic are at most immediate risk from rapid environmental changes. Consequently, knowledge of past and present biodiversity resources is essential to our ability to evaluate the extent of recent changes in biological communities and forecast future trends. While insects dominate most terrestrial ecosystems in terms of abundance and species richness, knowledge of their diversity and ecology lags well behind that of plants and vertebrates, especially in northern habitats. In Canada, as in many other countries, this knowledge gap is primarily due to overwhelming species numbers largely unmatched by taxonomic expertise, a situation that seriously hampers our ability to assess the impacts of environmental changes on the diversity, distribution and community composition of both invasive and native components of our entomological fauna.The work proposed here will help reverse this trend through (1) the production of taxonomic tools and data on muscoid flies, a group best known for its many pest species such as the house fly and various root maggots, but also one of the most speciose, abundant, and ecologically diverse in the arctic; (2) the development and integration in the taxonomic workflow of near infrared spectroscopy, a technique with the potential to greatly accelerate specimen identification and species discovery in muscid flies and other insects; and (3) the investigation of muscoid phenotype, emergence phenology and species composition variability over a 15 years time period at a high arctic locality undergoing rapid climatic changes.