Pine sawflies (Hymenoptera: Diprionidae: Diprion) are eruptive pests of pine and larch native to Eurasia, sometimes denuding whole forests. Despite the well-established economic significance of pine sawflies, and their invasive potential, there are no tools whatsoever for comprehensive identification of species within the genus Diprion: what few keys exist are regional, and some have not been translated into English.

At the USDA-ARS SEL, I work to mend this situation through dichotomous and matrix Lucid keys for identification of both sexes of Diprion, with morphological observations anchored by barcode sequencing. Along with factsheets compiling all available distributional and bionomic data for each of the 12 described Diprion spp., these will be made available for public use via IDTools. Species boundaries in Diprion will be illuminated by COI barcodes sampled from across the genus.

In addition, I am designing and illustrating the first global genus-level dichotomous key to adult Diprionidae since Benson (1939), also for public distribution on IDTools.