Geographical, temporal and taxonomic biases in insect GBIF data on biodiversity and extinction

Abstract

1. Analysis of geographic patterns of extinction must be accompanied by knowledge of biodiversity patterns. Such analysis is not yet available in insects given three shortfalls. First, knowledge of insect species' distribution is poor. Second, insect inventories have taxonomic, geographical, temporal and habitat biases. Third, the accelerated loss of insect species likely surpasses the rate at which the authors are discovering new species.2. The authors have examined the state of the art of knowledge of the geographical distribution of insect extinction risk and diversity, as well as their relation with human footprint.3. Insect records are highly scattered. Geographically, inventories are incomplete worldwide, except for some areas in Europe. Although the description of new insect species has increased in the last 40 years, this is biased towards lepidopterans and coleopterans. Comparably, IUCN-listed species has also increased in the last 40 years, yet with biases towards odonates and lepidopterans. Likewise, aquatic species have been more intensively sampled and considered by the IUCN than terrestrial species. Of high priority are some pristine areas but with few insect records, whereas the east coast of the United States, Europe and Japan raise concerns given that the human footprint exceeded the species richness of insects registered.

Representation of global change drivers across biodiversity datasets

“…For example, longer-lived species may have greater lagged responses to global change drivers such as landuse change when compared with species with shorter generation times 13 . We found that birds were the best-, and arthropods the worst-represented taxa across the Living Planet, BioTIME and PREDICTS databases (Figure 5), as commonly found in ecological datasets 8,9,65 . Recently, invertebrates and in particular insects have been highlighted as a taxon experiencing potential steep declines in abundance and biomass 56,57 , yet such findings are confounded by the general paucity of invertebrate data [60][61][62] (but see 68 for a recent effort in compiling insect data).…”

“…Taxonomic representation in biodiversity analyses could influence the detected global change responses, with certain taxa being more or less sensitive to global change [64][65][66][67] . For example, longer-lived species may have greater lagged responses to global change drivers such as landuse change when compared with species with shorter generation times 13 .…”

“…In this study, we present a framework to test data representation across different global change drivers over space and time that can be applied to other datasets. We recommend that future syntheses explicitly include tests of the representation of their data for the global change drivers being tested in addition to highlighting other data gap 26,33,38,65,[71][72][73][74] .…”

Maximizing citizen scientists’ contribution to automated species recognition

“…Addressing the current crisis related to the loss of biodiversity necessarily involves addressing several fundamental knowledge gaps 1,2 . Currently there are vast spatial, temporal and especially taxonomic gaps and biases in global primary biodiversity data sets, and these biases are limiting our understanding of the earth's biosphere [3][4][5][6] . Automatic or semi-automatic observation methods based on image recognition hold great promise in solving some of the taxonomic biases currently experienced 7 .…”

Research networks should improve connectivity for halting freshwater insect extinctions

“…increase/decrease of species abundance or richness over time) (hereafter called status) (Dirzo et al ., 2014; Cardoso et al ., 2020; Albert et al ., 2021). Despite that, biodiversity studies towards conservation actions (hereafter called solutions), such as the selection of priority areas, design of protected areas, and ecosystems restoration, have increased recently (Watson et al ., 2014; Godet & Devictor, 2018; Maas et al ., 2019; Rocha‐Ortega et al ., 2021), some of them testing and proposing solutions to prevent insect loss (Samways et al ., 2020). Conservation studies assessing threats, status, and solutions are equally important to implement strategies preventing decline of insect biodiversity.…”