Barcodes Are a Useful Tool for Labeling and Tracking Ecological Samples

Barcodes are used to label and track just about everything these days. Look around your office, in your medicine cabinet, at the package you just received in the mail, or on the shelves of any shop in town, and you will immediately grasp the ubiquity of their use. Interestingly, railroads and supermarkets were the early pioneers of barcode development: the former needing a way to track railway car location and ownership on a national scale, the latter needing a way to track a diverse array of products and to decrease checkout times (Nelson 1997). Barcodes first came to use in the sciences via the field of medicine, and the medical literature contains hundreds of publications describing how this technology has reduced errors in patient specimen identification and handling, where error mitigation is crucial. In short, barcodes have been adopted by many industries, and in many fields they are now synonymous with asset tracking.