Metazoan metabarcoding is emerging as an essential strategy for inventorying biodiversity, with diverse projects currently generating massive quantities of community-level data. The potential for integrating across such data sets offers new opportunities to better understand biodiversity and how it might respond to global change. However, large-scale syntheses may be compromised if metabarcoding workflows differ from each other. There are ongoing efforts to improve standardization for the reporting of inventory data. However, harmonization at the stage of generating metabarcode data has yet to be addressed. A modular framework for harmonized data generation offers a pathway to navigate the complex structure of terrestrial metazoan biodiversity. Here, through our collective expertise as practitioners, method developers, and researchers leading metabarcoding initiatives to inventory terrestrial biodiversity, we seek to initiate a harmonized framework for metabarcode data generation, with a terrestrial arthropod module. We develop an initial set of submodules covering the 5 main steps of metabarcode data generation: (i) sample acquisition; (ii) sample processing; (iii) DNA extraction; (iv) polymerase chain reaction amplification, library preparation, and sequencing; and (v) DNA sequence and metadata deposition, providing a backbone for a terrestrial arthropod module. To achieve this, we (i) identified key points for harmonization, (ii) reviewed the current state of the art, and (iii) distilled existing knowledge within submodules, thus promoting best practice by providing guidelines and recommendations to reduce the universe of methodological options. We advocate the adoption and further development of the terrestrial arthropod module. We further encourage the development of modules for other biodiversity fractions as an essential step toward large-scale biodiversity synthesis through harmonization.

Biodiversity and Biocomplexity Unit Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University 904 0495 Japan

Biology Centre Czech Academy of Sciences Institute of Entomology 37005 Ceske Budejovice Czech Republic

Centre for Biodiversity Genomics University of Guelph N1G2W1 Guelph Canada

Centre for Biodiversity Monitoring Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig D 53113 Bonn Germany

Department of Biogeography Trier University D 54296 Trier Germany

Department of Biological Sciences University of Cyprus 1678 Nicosia Cyprus

Department of Environment and Agronomy INIA CSIC 28040 Madrid Spain

Department of Life Sciences Imperial College London SW7 2AZ London UK

Department of Life Sciences Natural History Museum SW7 5BD London UK

Faculty of Science University of South Bohemia 37005 Ceske Budejovice Czech Republic

Institut de Biologie de l'ENS Département de biologie École normale supérieure CNRS INSERM Université PSL 75005 Paris France

Island Ecology and Evolution Research Group Institute of Natural Products and Agrobiology 38206 San Cristóbal de la Laguna Spain

Laboratory of Nematology Department of Plant Sciences Wageningen University and Research 6708PB Wageningen The Netherlands

Naturalis Biodiversity Center 2300 RA Leiden The Netherlands

School of Environmental Sciences University of Guelph N1G2W1 Guelph Canada

Section for Evolutionary Genomics Globe Institute Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences University of Copenhagen 1353 Copenhagen Denmark

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