Voucher and metagenetic sequencing of DNA barcodes of wild-collected bees (Apoidea) from Iowa, USA

High-throughput methods for identification of pollinator taxa are desirable to improve our understanding of pollinator distributions, population trends, and ecology. Genetic sequencing of taxonomically informative 'barcode' loci is one high-throughput strategy, which can be applied to individual specimens using Sanger technology and to complex mixtures using metabarcoding technology. This study generated Sanger sequencing data from morphologically identified specimens and metabarcoding data derived from pooled tissues.

This data release consists of several files:
1. sample.metadata.txt, which contains sampling metadata and identifiers linking to sequence data that has been deposited in the Sequence Read Archive of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). This database is authoritative and comprehensive for sharing high-throughput sequence data produced with public funds. All NCBI-derived accessions listed in the file can be searched at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov to retrieve sample and sequence information.
2. raw.counts.txt, which is a tab-delimited table of counts of individual metabarcode sequences that are attributed to each detected bee genus.
3. BeeSangerSequencesFASTA.txt, which is a text document in FASTA format containing the DNA sequences obtained from the individual specimens using Sanger sequencing technology.
4. reference.sequences.fasta, which is a text document in FASTA format containing the DNA sequences obtained from public databases for taxonomic assignment of metabarcode sequences as described in the process steps.