Cross-sector partnership and DNA barcoding to boost biological knowledge in megadiverse countries

Global biodiversity loss requires efforts from all sectors to preserve what may be last refuges for species in transformed ecosystems. Furthermore, robust DNA reference libraries are essential for advancing future biodiversity monitoring. However, huge gaps remain, particularly in tropical regions. We conducted rapid biodiversity inventories in four Voluntary Corporate Conservation Areas in Colombia (VCCA) that seek to combine oil operations while preserving biodiversity. Our approach combined strategic sequencing prioritization of vertebrates, plants, and focal arthropods to close genetic knowledge gaps, with a systematic Malaise-trap experiment to assess arthropod richness and turnover using cost-effective MinION sequencing. This industry-enabled effort generated 5037 barcodes representing 2517 taxonomic entities. Arthropod BIN-based analyses revealed high richness and turnover among localities and land covers. Notably, 42.4% of the sequences were new to BOLD, expanding reference data and existing public records for these regions by two- to nine-fold. MinION processing reduced per-sample sequencing costs from USD 6.25-10.41 to ~USD 0.65, providing a scalable and cost-effective strategy to inventory ‘dark taxa’. Our results set the base for further biodiversity planning by the industry in their operational area and illustrate that industry-enabled molecular workflows can accelerate biodiversity knowledge and provide reference data for future applications such as DNA-based monitoring.