The aim of the field research in Indonesia is to develop a standardized biodiversity discovery pipeline to speed up the process from sampling, identification, and storing promising target taxa from underexplored high biodiversity areas. The pipeline comprises three major components and methods in the field: sampling of specimens, sorting (and primary sample identification), and databasing (data collection in a database).
Another important part of the pipeline is molecular biodiversity assessment: DNA barcoding is a molecular tool for the fast and reliable identification of biological specimens and for the discovery of unknown species. Specimens for the DNA barcoding part of the pipeline are processed at the Zoologische Staatssammlung München (ZSM) and are afterwards returned and permanently deposited at the Indonesian partner institute Museum Zoologicum Bogoriense (Research Center for Biology – LIPI in Cibinong, Indonesia). For more details please see zsmblog.de.
Field research is managed and conducted by international teams of project scientists and taxonomic experts from European and Indonesian research institutions. Two teams already collected in Mount Halimun Salak National Park, a 400 km² conservation area in West Java, in 2015 and 2016.
