Perspective: Where might be many tropical insects?

By D. Janzen, W. Hallwachs. Biological Conservation, 2019

118 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract I have been watching the gradual and very visible decline of Mexican and Central American insect density and species richness since 1953 and Winnie since 1978. The loss is very real for essentially all higher taxa, and the reasons are very evident: intense forest and agricultural simplification of very large areas, massive use of pesticides, habitat fragmentation, and at least since the 1980's, ever-increasing climate change in temperature, rainfall, and synchronization of seasonal cues. There is no ecological concept suggesting that this biodiversity and habitat impoverishment is restricted to this portion of the Neotropics, and our 50 years of occasional visits to other parts of the tropics suggest the same. We are losing most of the insect community that is still in the cloud forests due to the drying of the tops of tropical mountains, just as we are losing the huge expanses of insect communities that once occupied the fertile soils, weather, and water of the lowland tropics. Today we have unimaginable access to the world's biodiversity through the internet, roads, dwellings, education, bioliterate societies, DNA barcoding, genome sequencing, and human curiosity. The wild world gains from our understanding that it needs large and diverse terrain, relief from hunting trees and animals, site-specific restoration, profit-sharing with its societies, and tolerance of humans and our extended genomes. But if our terrestrial world remains constructed through constant war with the arthropod world, along with the plants, fungi and nematodes, human society will lose very big time. The house is burning. We do not need a thermometer. We need a fire hose.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a9334e5b0c8d7b478450e78e7c884c1c3d7fc9b1

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Citations in the corpus

Declining abundance of beetles, moths and caddisflies in the Netherlands (2019, background): “Nevertheless, studies on these species largely reveal patterns of decline in abundance over recent decades (Sánchez-Bayo &Wyckhuys, 2019), with reports on insect declines coming from tropics (Lister & Garcia, 2018; Janzen & Hallwachs, 2019), to the arctic (Gillespie et al., 2019).”
Insect Declines in the Anthropocene. (2020, background): “One unfortunate conclusion of this review is that many declines are occurring inside preserves (28, 68, 87, 109, 148, 159).”
Is the insect apocalypse upon us? How to find out (2020, background): “Finally, with so few data from outside Europe, it is difficult to gauge how widespread the phenomenon is, especially in the tropics (Basset and Lamarre, 2019; Janzen and Hallwachs, 2019) and southern temperate regions, where more than 85% of all insect species occur (Stork, 2018).”
Insect responses to global change offer signposts for biodiversity and conservation (2020, background): “Climate change will continue to reduce geographic niche space, particularly in the tropics (Colwell et al., 2008; Janzen & Hallwachs, 2019), so protecting habitats over gradients of elevation or vegetation structure may be crucial to increase the resilience of species and ecosystem functions (see…”
Light pollution is a driver of insect declines (2020, background): “Over the last two decades, researchers have uncovered steep declines in insect diversity and biomass (Dirzo et al., 2014; Potts et al., 2010) across geographically distinct areas including Germany (Hallmann et al., 2017), the Netherlands (van Langevelde et al., 2018; van Strien et al., 2019), Sweden”