Madrid. Of the world’s insect species, 76 percent are not adequately covered by protected areas, according to a new study published in the journal One Earth.
Insects play a crucial role in almost all ecosystems, pollinating more than 80 percent of plants and being an important food source for thousands of vertebrate species; however, populations are declining worldwide and conservation efforts continue to overlook them, the study warns. Protected areas can safeguard threatened species, but only if they live in reserves, they point out.
“It is time that we take insects into account in conservation assessments. Countries should include them in planning protected areas and managing existing ones,” said Shawan Chowdhury, lead author of the paper and conservation biologist at the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research.
Although protected areas are known to actively safeguard many vertebrate species from major anthropogenic threats, the extent to which this is true for insects is largely unknown. To determine what proportion of insect species are protected in these reserves, Chowdhury and his colleagues overlaid species distribution data from the World Biodiversity Information Facility with maps of those refuges.
They found that 76 percent of the world’s insect species are underrepresented in protected areas, including several critically endangered such as the dinosaur ant, the Hawaiian crimson damselfly and the caparisoned tiger moth. In addition, the global distribution of 1,876 species from 225 families does not coincide at all with that of protected areas.
severe deficit
The authors were surprised by the degree of underrepresentation. “A lot of insect data comes from protected areas, so we thought the proportion of species covered by protected areas would be higher. The shortfall is also much more severe than in a similar analysis that was done on vertebrate species, which found that 57 percent of 25,380 vertebrate species were under-covered,” Chowdhury explained.
In some regions the insects were better protected than in others. In Amazonia, Sahara-Arabia, Western Australia, the Neotropics, Afrotropics and Central Europe, the percentage of protected species was relatively high, while in North America, Eastern Europe, South and Southeast Asia and Australasia it was insufficient.
Historically, conservation programs have overlooked insects, and this research was limited by the paucity of data on their distribution.
“Of the estimated 5.5 million species of insects in the world, only the distributions of 89,151 species could be modelled. More than 80 percent of all animals are insects, yet they only represent 8 percent of the species assessed on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species,” Chowdhury said.
Even if the insects live within reserves, they may not be reaping the benefits of this “protection,” Chowdhury added. “Many insect species are declining in protected areas due to threats such as rapid environmental change, loss of corridors and roads within those areas,” he warned.
“Steps can be taken to effectively conserve insects, and the participation of all kinds of people is essential. Citizen science could have a huge impact in filling the data gap on insect distribution. Scientists and policy makers must now step up and help in this challenge of identifying sites of importance for insect conservation,” he concluded.
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