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Abstract Carpenter ants in the genus Camponotus are large, conspicuous ants that are abundant and ecologically influential in many terrestrial ecosystems. The bicolored carpenter ant, Camponotus vicinus Mayr, is distributed across a wide range of elevations and latitudes in western North America, where it is a prominent scavenger and predator. Here, we present a high-quality genome assembly of C. vicinus from a sample collected in Sonoma County, California, near the type locality of the species. This genome assembly consists of 38 scaffolds spanning 302.74 Mb, with contig N50 of 15.9 Mb, scaffold N50 of 19.9 Mb, and BUSCO completeness of 99.2%. This genome sequence will be a valuable resource for exploring the evolutionary ecology of C. vicinus and carpenter ants generally. It also provides an important tool for clarifying cryptic diversity within the C. vicinus species complex, a genetically diverse set of populations, some of which are quite localized and of conservation interest. 

Abstract Damselflies and dragonflies (Order: Odonata) play important roles in both aquatic and terrestrial food webs and can serve as sentinels of ecosystem health and predictors of population trends in other taxa. The habitat requirements and limited dispersal of lotic damselflies make them especially sensitive to habitat loss and fragmentation. As such, landscape genomic studies of these taxa can help focus conservation efforts on watersheds with high levels of genetic diversity, local adaptation, and even cryptic endemism. Here, as part of the California Conservation Genomics Project (CCGP), we report the first reference genome for the American rubyspot damselfly, Hetaerina americana, a species associated with springs, streams and rivers throughout California. Following the CCGP assembly pipeline, we produced two de novo genome assemblies. The primary assembly includes 1,630,044,487 base pairs, with a contig N50 of 5.4 Mb, a scaffold N50 of 86.2 Mb, and a BUSCO completeness score of 97.6%. This is the seventh Odonata genome to be made publicly available and the first for the subfamily Hetaerininae. This reference genome fills an important phylogenetic gap in our understanding of Odonata genome evolution, and provides a genomic resource for a host of interesting ecological, evolutionary, and conservation questions for which the rubyspot damselfly genus Hetaerina is an important model system.