Japanese Lepidoptera barcoding project (All-Leps Japan)
The Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) is one of the major targets of the Barcode of Life (BOL) project. A quarter of all known species (about 40,000 species) have already been barcoded by the Lepidoptera BOL campaign, a part of the international BOL project.
The lepidopteran fauna of Japan is rather well described by previous taxonomic studies. More than 6,200 described species have been recorded from Japan. However, only a small fraction of these species have been barcoded.
In 2010, we launched a working group for the DNA barcode campaign of Japanese Lepidoptera. This working group is supported by related projects such as the Japanese Barcode of Life Initiative (JBOLI), the Japan national node of Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and some taxonomic database projects. Also, this project will collaborate with the international BOL project. Now we are constructing a specimen collection for barcoding with collaborators.
Contact information
Utsugi Jinbo
Department of Systems Sciences,
University of Tokyo
E-mail: cujinbo [at] mail.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp
