Résumé
Background: French Guiana is a French Overseas Department of ~ 84 000 km2, 98% being covered by dense, overwhelmingly primary, equatorial Amazonian forest. Terrestrial habitats belong to the Guiana Shield biogeographical region, hosting an outstanding, largely unexplored invertebrate diversity. Results: Since 2010, our inventory of lepidopteran communities of several sites has implemented an integrative approach where DNA barcoding is the initial screening tool for specimen curation followed by diversity analyses. The thousands of records generated by these surveys have been complemented in BOLD (the Barcode of Life Data System) by independent projects focusing on the taxonomy of several families, for a current total of nearly 20 000 records representing more than 5000 Barcode Index Numbers (BINs). Here, we present a summary of the current coverage of this regional DNA barcoding library, and we emphasize through examples how it significantly accelerates species discovery and description and how it improves our understanding of spatial and temporal turnover in lepidopteran communities. Significance: The massive DNA barcoded reference collection assembled at Museum national d'Histoire Naturelle is a fundamental resource for biologists working on the diversity of these insects in Amazonia.