Predicting a global insect apocalypse

By Pedro Cardoso, Simon R. Leather. Insect Conservation and Diversity, 2019

100 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The last 3 years have seen a global outbreak of media headlines predicting a global insect apocalypse and a subsequent collapse of natural ecosystems, a so‐called ‘ecological armageddon’ resulting in the demise of human civilisation as we know it. Despite the worrying implications of these papers, all studies on global insect extinction to date clearly reflect the Prestonian shortfall, the general lack of knowledge on the abundance of species and their trends in space and time. Data currently available concerning global insect abundance trends invariably suffer from phylogenetic, functional, habitat, spatial and temporal bias. Here, we suggest that to follow the real global changes in insect (and all other taxa) communities, biases or shortcomings in data collection must be avoided. An optimised scheme would maximise phylogenetic, functional, habitat, spatial and temporal coverage with minimum investment. Standardised sampling would provide primary data, on a first step in the form of abundance and biomass. Individuals would then be identified to species level whenever possible, with a morphospecies approach or genetics serving as intermediate steps, complementing or even final steps for non‐described species. If standardised abundance and ecological data can be readily made available, biodiversity trends can be tracked in real time and allow us to predict and prevent an impending global insect apocalypse.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6209a7c736bad822cefc709eeb5ac48ab8b6d188

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Citations in the corpus

Is the insect apocalypse upon us? How to find out (2020, background): “The greatest challenge to studying insect trends, in diversity, abundance, range, occurrence or other metrics, is the paucity of baseline data (Cardoso et al., 2011; Eisenhauer et al., 2019; Wagner, 2017, 2019b; Cardoso and Leather, 2019): we lack robust records of past insect populations and divers”
Geographical, temporal and taxonomic biases in insect GBIF data on biodiversity and extinction (2021, background): “Invertebrates constitute over 99% of species diversity, yet only a tiny fraction has been assessed for status, which dramatically leads to underestimates of overall levels of extinction (Cardoso & Leather, 2019).”
Interpreting insect declines: seven challenges and a way forward (2020, background): “This will, of course, come as no surprise to entomologists, who have been reading about declining insect populations in Insect Conservation and Diversity, among other journals, for at least a decade (e.g. Shortall et al., 2009; Fox, 2013; Cardoso & Leather, 2019).”
Insect responses to global change offer signposts for biodiversity and conservation (2020, background): “In turn, information on the geographic distribution, abundance, and ecological requirements of most of the approximately one million named insect species is scarce (Cardoso et al., 2011; Cardoso & Leather, 2019).”