Muscoid Diptera biodiversity

目前的生物多样性危机是一个全球现象，某些地区，如北极，面临着快速环境变化的最直接风险。因此，了解过去和现在的生物多样性资源对于我们评估生物群落最近变化的程度和预测未来趋势的能力至关重要。虽然昆虫在数量和物种丰富度方面在大多数陆地生态系统中占主导地位，但对其多样性和生态的了解远远落后于植物和脊椎动物，特别是在北方生境。在加拿大，与许多其他国家一样，这种知识差距主要是由于物种数量巨大，而分类学专业知识基本上无法匹配，这种情况严重阻碍了我们评估环境变化对我们昆虫动物群的入侵和本地成分的多样性，分布和群落组成的影响的能力。这里提出的工作将有助于扭转这一趋势，通过（1）生产分类工具和数据的muscoid苍蝇，一组最有名的许多害虫物种，如家蝇和各种根蛆，但也是最speciose，丰富，生态多样性在北极地区;（2）近红外光谱分类工作流程的发展和整合，这项技术有可能大大加快蝇类和其他昆虫的标本鉴定和物种发现;（3）在经历快速气候变化的北极高纬度地区，调查了15年来的蝇类表型、羽化物候和物种组成变化。 ********

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. ********