The Area Conservación Guanacaste (ACG) in northwestern Costa Rica is a 156,000 hectare reserve, established in the 1980s and 1990s through creative means described in William Allen’s book Green Phoenix. An inventory of butterflies and moths has been ongoing in ACG for 25 years (Janzen et al. 2005; Janzen et al. 2009). Barcoding was incorporated into the inventory in 2004 and following the successes of early studies (Janzen et al. 2005; Hajibabaei et al. 2006; Janzen et al. 2009) it became clear that building an inventory of the entire fauna of butterflies and macromoths within this diverse Neotropical reserve was a worthwhile and achievable goal. The “BioLep Project” (Janzen 2008) aims to use DNA barcodes to build an accurate and complete inventory of the 9,600 species of butterflies and macromoths within the ACG and the same time contribute to the growing reference library of lepidopteran DNA barcodes. This is the first large-scale regional barcode inventory of any site in the world. The framework used in this project is broadly and cheaply applicable throughout the tropics and could provide a scalable model from which to attempt to barcode all the world’s lepidopterans and other insect groups. The entire collection process – blacklight trapping, pinning, sampling (one leg per specimen), packaging and shipping were carried out by Dr. Janzen’s parataxonomist team in the ACG (http//janzen.sas.upenn.edu). Legs received at Guelph were processed largely following protocols and methods previously described in Hajibabaei et al. (2005); Hajibabaei et al. (2006); deWaard et al. (2007); Ivanoa et al. (2007); and the latest protocols are available on the CCDB website www.dnabarcoding.ca.
