Case Study: Himalayas, India

India is one of the world’s megadiverse nations a country that cradles approximately 7.5% of all known life on Earth within just 2.4% of its land surface. Yet despite 250 years of scientific exploration an estimated 85% of India’s faunal diversity remains undiscovered. At the current pace completing a full catalog of Indian biodiversity would take over 1,700 years. Against a backdrop of accelerating climate change, habitat loss, and species extinction, that timeline is simply not acceptable.

This urgent reality is what drives our work at the Zoological Survey of India, under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) of Government of India. We are currently leading the largest biodiversity assessment project in the Indian Himalayan Region – a landscape of extraordinary ecological significance and staggering species richness. Funded by the National Mission for Himalayan Studies (NMHS), our mission is to dramatically accelerate the pace of biodiversity discovery by harnessing the power of high-throughput DNA sequencing technologies.

To achieve this, we have established a dedicated Biodiversity Monitoring Lab in Kolkata, India, equipped with Oxford Nanopore Technology sequencing platforms. At the heart of our sequencing workflow is ONTOLOGY, the integrated software suite developed by the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics. From the moment we adopted ONTOLOGY, it transformed the way we work.

Before ONTOLOGY, DNA barcoding was a goal that felt perpetually out of reach for institutions in lower-income countries. The technical barriers like complex bioinformatics pipelines, expensive infrastructure, and the need for highly specialized expertise made large-scale barcoding workflows prohibitive. ONTOLOGY changed that equation entirely. Its ready-to-use streamlined pipeline enabled our team to generate accurate, high-quality DNA barcodes from Himalayan specimens rapidly and cost-effectively, without requiring an advanced bioinformatics background. For an institution like ours, working across some of the most remote terrain on Earth, this accessibility is genuinely transformative.

What excites us most is that ONTOLOGY has made field-based DNA sequencing a reality for our team for the first time. The intuitive, end-to-end design of the pipeline means our researchers can now generate DNA barcodes directly at the point of collection in the field, in the mountains, far from a conventional laboratory. This is not just a workflow improvement; it is a fundamental shift in how biodiversity science can be done in challenging and remote environments.

With this foundation now in place, we are beginning to explore dimensions of biodiversity science that were previously beyond our reach. Using ONTOLOGY’s metabarcoding workflow, we will be studying seasonal and altitudinal variation in species communities across the Indian Himalayan Region, questions that require exactly the kind of rapid, high-volume, and cost-effective sequencing that ONTOLOGY enables. These analyses will provide critical data on how Himalayan biodiversity is structured, shifts with elevation, and responds to environmental change over time.

India’s biodiversity crisis demands urgency, scale, and innovation. ONTOLOGY has given us all three.

We are proud to be among the first institutions in Asia to deploy this technology at this scale, and we are deeply grateful to the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics for building a tool that genuinely democratizes genomic biodiversity science making it possible for countries like India to finally close the gap between what we know and what remains yet to be discovered.