Dynamics of global institutional collaboration in insect taxonomy reveal imbalance of taxonomic effort

<p class="3">This literature review seeks to outline the state of the art regarding collaboration between educational institutions on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) launched in Europe and in the US for the past 10 years. The review explores enablers and barriers that influence national institutional MOOC collaboration, and looks into how existing knowledge about institutional collaboration on e-learning can be used in MOOC collaboration. The review is based on a literature search in databases and on snowballing techniques. It concludes that collaboration on MOOCs can be advantageous in terms of ensuring quality and innovation in the common learning designs, and that—in order to succeed—such projects need strategic and institutional support from all partners involved. Moreover, the review points out barriers concerning the reluctance of individual institutions to engage in national collaboration due to fear of potential loss of their own national branding and the teachers’ hesitancy or passive resistance to new educational platforms and formats.</p>

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J O Westwood Medal and Award for Insect Taxonomy

Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift ◽

10.1002/mmnd.200890000 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 55 (2) ◽

pp. 207-207

Author(s):

Mike Claridge ◽

Malcolm Scoble

Keyword(s):

Insect Taxonomy

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Pipeline for Progress: Multi-Level Institutional Collaboration for Engineering Education

10.18260/1-2--22354 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Caye Drapcho ◽

Lib Crockett

Keyword(s):

Engineering Education ◽

Institutional Collaboration ◽

Multi Level

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Anti-Oppressive Composition Pedagogies

The Radical Teacher ◽

10.5195/rt.2019.729 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 115 ◽

pp. 1-4

Author(s):

Julia Havard ◽

Erica Cardwell ◽

Anandi Rao

Keyword(s):

Working Group ◽

Community Building ◽

University Of California ◽

Community Transformation ◽

Institutional Collaboration ◽

Multiple Levels ◽

Composition Pedagogies ◽

The University

The project of creating an anti-oppressive composition issue began with multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional collaboration between Julia Havard, Erica Cardwell, Anandi Rao, Juliet Kunkle and Rosalind Diaz, who crafted a call for community-building and community-transformation: to build tools, resources, and spaces for transforming our classrooms, specifically our writing classrooms; and to approach the teaching of composition in community, with accountability, and with urgency. This collaboration started as a working group at the University of California Berkeley, Radical Decolonial Queer Pedagogies of Composition, as a number of instructors at multiple levels of the academic heirarchy struggled with the differences between our writing classrooms and our research. Following Condon and Young (2016), Inoe (2015), and Gumbs (2012), our editing team wanted to create a context and process for rich unraveling of un-teaching oppressive systems through composition.

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Promoting Research through an Inter-Institutional Collaboration Model in Bahrain

MedEdPublish ◽

10.15694/mep.2020.000247.1 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Randah Hamadeh ◽

Khaled Tabbara ◽

Joe McMenamin ◽

Davinder Sandhu

Keyword(s):

Institutional Collaboration ◽

Collaboration Model

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Host phylogeny drives the structure and diversity of insect microbiota

10.1101/2021.07.19.452888 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Antonino Malacrino'

Keyword(s):

Bacterial Communities ◽

Management Practices ◽

Life Stage ◽

Future Research ◽

Sequencing Data ◽

Insect Nutrition ◽

Common Framework ◽

Host Phylogeny ◽

Insect Taxonomy ◽

Outstanding Question

Microorganisms have an enormous impact on most of the life that inhabits our planet. Insects are an excellent example, as research showed that several microbial species are essential for insect nutrition, reproduction, fitness, defence and many other functions. More recently, we assisted to an exponential growth of studies describing the taxonomical composition of bacterial communities across insects' phylogeny. However, there is still an outstanding question that needs to be answered: which factors contribute most in shaping insects' microbiomes? This study tries to find an answer to this question by taking advantage of publicly available sequencing data and reanalysing over 4,000 samples of insect-associated bacterial communities under a common framework. Results suggest that insect taxonomy has a wider impact on the structure and diversity of their associated microbial communities than the other factors considered (diet, sex, life stage, sample origin and treatment). Also, a survey of the literature highlights several methodological limitations that needs to be considered in future research endeavours. This study proofs the amount of collective effort that lead to the current understanding of insect-microbiota interactions and their influence on insect biology, ecology and evolution with potential impact on insect conservation and management practices.

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High-Throughput Sequencing for Life-History Sorting and for Bridging Reference Sequences in Marine Gerromorpha (Insecta: Heteroptera)

Insect Systematics and Diversity ◽

10.1093/isd/ixab024 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 6 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Jia Jin Marc Chang ◽

Yin Cheong Aden Ip ◽

Lanna Cheng ◽

Ismael Kunning ◽

Ralph R Mana ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Life History ◽

High Throughput Sequencing ◽

Association Studies ◽

Morphological Characters ◽

Adult Males ◽

Accurate Identification ◽

Life History Stages ◽

Coi Sequences ◽

Primer Sets ◽

Insect Taxonomy

Abstract Accurate identification and association of larval specimens with adults is a major challenge in insect taxonomy. Fortunately, it is now possible for nonexperts to sort collections of bulk samples with DNA barcodes rapidly and cost-effectively. We demonstrate this process using nanopore barcoding of 757 marine insects (Insecta: Gerromorpha), of which 81% were nymphs and many samples did not have co-occurring adult males for specific identification. We successfully associated 738 specimens (97%) to nine gerromorphan species, which would have been impossible to identify using morphological characters alone. This improved ability to incorporate information from all life-history stages has led to greater precision of species distributional ranges—knowledge that will be crucial for a more complete understanding of marine insects. We also highlighted two distinct, nonoverlapping Gerromorpha COI sequence databases on GenBank—a consequence of using two different primer sets to amplify different regions of COI. This issue inevitably hinders species identification with DNA-based methods, particularly for poorly represented groups such as marine insects. We bridged these databases by analyzing full-length COI sequences. We believe this will inspire future studies to incorporate DNA-based methods for more adult–larval association studies and for enhancing existing genetic resources, especially in understudied groups.

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