Dear Colleagues,

In the last decade, high-throughput sequencing (HTS) techniques have been largely proposed or directly applied to investigate biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, ranging from the assessment of communities inhabiting various environments (e.g., soil and water) to studies dealing with ecological interactions (e.g., pollination, prey–predator, host–parasite, and various commensalism and competition cases). In all these studies, HTS increased the resolution of the investigation, in order to describe changes of biodiversity over time and space, with studies spanning from ancient biological residues (e.g., lake sediments) up to the impacts of climate change, of human activities and of pollution of the current times.

More recently, HTS technologies related to DNA-based identifications, has devoted great attention to bioinformatic tools aimed at assigning the sequencing products to taxonomic units. At the same time, additional renewal of the field has been provided by the exploitation of fast-evolving automatic tools and statistical approaches, e.g., based on machine learning systems.

This Special Issue is focused on new approaches and advances in species and interaction identification based on HTS techniques. Special attention will be paid to studies addressing the new frontiers of HTS application in the context of biodiversity, biomonitoring, and ecosystem functioning, or that elucidate novel and robust analytical and bioinformatics pipelines. We particularly encourage studies with practical and applied scopes, and that integrate various scientific disciplines.

We cordially invite researchers working actively in these fields to submit their original research manuscripts to this Special Issue.

Dr. Andrea Galimberti
Dr. Paolo Biella
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Diversity is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Biomonitoring
• Ecosystem services
• Diet analysis
• High-throughput sequencing advances
• Species assignment pipelines
• DNA metabarcoding
• Species interaction networks
• eDNA
• Human impacts on biodiversity