Protected areas failing to guard two-thirds of global insect species

By Pol Allingham via SWNS

Protected areas are failing to guard two-thirds of global insect species, warns a new study.

Despite their crucial role in nearly every ecosystem, insect populations are collapsing around the world.

Researchers from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDIV) were surprised to discover how inadequately protected areas defend insects.

The zones protect species but only if they live inside them - even inside, they shield vertebrates from humans but it remains unknown how far insects receive the same care.

The iDIV study found 76 percent of insects were not adequately protected by the areas, a number far higher than previous estimates.

Critically endangered insects were among those found to be poorly protected.

Dinosaur ants, the crimson Hawaiian damselflies, and harnessed tiger moths are all highly likely to be made extinct worldwide but are inadequately protected by the zones.

Moreover, 1,876 species from 225 families do not overlap with protected areas at all.

This is despite critters pollinating over 80 percent of plants and serving as a major food source for thousands of vertebrates.

Lead author Dr. Shawan Chowdhury, a conservation biologist at iDiv, said: “It's high time we considered insects in conservation assessments.

“Countries must include insects in protected area planning and when managing the existing ones.

“A lot of insect data comes from protected areas, so we thought that the proportion of species covered by protected areas would be higher.

“The shortfall is also much more severe than a similar analysis that was conducted on vertebrate species, which found that 57% of 25,380 vertebrate species were inadequately covered.”

He added insects have long been overlooked by conservation programs, and this is reflected by the lack of data available to study them.

“Of the estimated 5.5 million insect species globally, we could only model the distributions of 89,151 species.

“Over 80% of all animals are insects, yet insects comprise only 8% of the assessed species on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

“Many insect species are declining within protected areas because of threats such as rapid environmental change, loss of corridors, and roads inside protected areas.

“A number of steps can be taken to efficiently conserve insects, and participation from all sorts of people is essential.

“Citizen science could have an enormous impact in filling the data gap on insect distributions.

“Scientists and policymakers must now step up and help with this challenge of identifying sites of importance for insect conservation.”

Species in North America, Eastern Europe, South and Southeast Asia, and Australasia were least protected.

Though critters did receive adequate protection in Amazonia, Saharo-Arabia, Western Australia, the Neoptropics the Afrotropics and Central Europe.

Global maps and data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility were analyzed to find out how far insects are protected for the study published in One Earth.