What evidence exists on conservation actions to conserve insects? A protocol for a systematic map of literature reviews

Abstract

Background Insects play a central role in the functioning of terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems and contribute to a multitude of ecosystem services in managed and unmanaged systems Even local declines of insect abundance and richness can have enormous ecological and economic consequences. Evidence-informed conservation actions are essential to prevent potential cascading consequences of insect declines, and to help declining populations recover. Policy-makers rely on syntheses of primary research, such as reviews and meta-analyses, when making decisions about which conservation actions to implement. These evidence reviews vary in their quality, and do not necessarily synthesise the full range of scientific evidence found in the primary literature, which hampers decision-making. This evidence review map will identify, catalogue, and describe evidence reviews that investigate actions and policies to conserve insect biodiversity. This will help policy makers identify relevant reviews and researchers to identify synthesis gaps. It will also generate a list of conservation actions which can feed into future synthesis projects. We will produce an interactive database of evidence reviews, acting as a bibliography for policy-makers, curate a list of insect conservation actions that have been reviewed, and identify synthesis gaps for conservation actions that have not been reviewed. Methods We will search for evidence reviews across seven large, generic bibliographic databases, a database of environmental reviews, and five grey literature resources using a search string consisting of an insect substring, a biodiversity or population response substring, an evidence synthesis substring, and a conservation substring. The results will be deduplicated and then screened at title and abstract (concurrently) and full text levels against predefined inclusion criteria. We will initially perform consistency checking on a subset of records at each level to ensure the inclusion criteria are sufficiently clear and understood by multiple reviewers. We will extract a suite of descriptive meta-data from relevant reviews, including a description of the action and information on each review’s focal taxa, biomes, and locations. If resources allow, we will apply the CEESAT critical appraisal tool for evidence reviews to assess validity of individual records and the evidence base as a whole. We will summarise our findings in an interactive database of reviews and other visualisations, including evidence atlases and heat maps (cross tabulations of the volume of evidence across two categorical variables). The findings of the evidence review map will support the identification of synthesis gaps and clusters that may warrant further attention through secondary research.

Global insect decline is the result of wilful political failure: A battle plan for entomology

“…The combination of widespread media misinterpretation of the results of the study (Didham et al, 2020;Saunders et al, 2020), statistical errors (Daskalova et al, 2021) and methodological issues in the meta-analysis (Haddaway et al, 2020;Mupepele et al, 2019) have been highlighted in responses to this study. Yet, each of these studies do not detract from a widespread scientific consensus on global biodiversity decline in invertebrates, though understanding the scale and trajectory of such declines is critical in mounting an appropriate level of response (Cardoso et al, 2019;Didham et al, 2020).…”

Eco-Innovation Diversity in a Circular Economy: Towards Circular Innovation Studies

“…Given the size of the dataset, we crucially opted for a new angle of analysis, limiting the pool of papers to those aiming at synthesis, namely "reviews" or "surveys" (including systematic reviews, bibliometric reviews, scoping reviews, literature reviews, etc.) [72]. The use of a (systematic) review of (systematic) reviews has been used in other research areas (namely in health sciences) where there are also too many studies to analyse when making decisions or answering specific research questions [73].…”

A demographic and ecological study of an Italian population of Polyommatus ripartii: the ESU Polyommatus exuberans

“…Specific management actions should be quickly adopted for conservation purposes. Collecting information about the ecology and biology of P. exuberans would corroborate the use of the ESU concept (Casacci et al 2014), and should improve conservation management and policy (Haddaway et al 2020). Here, we present the results of a pilot one-season investigation of the adult population located at Mompantero (NW Italy), which falls into two SAC (Special Areas of Conservation IT1110039 and IT1110030).…”

“…There is, therefore, a high risk of losing these species without even noticing it (McGarrahan 1997;Bonelli et al 2011;Theng et al 2020). Conservation actions, such as habitat protection and restoration, are likely to be effective in opposing the decline of local insect populations (Samways 2007;Forister et al 2019;Haddaway et al 2020;Crossley et al 2021). To be effective, policy and management must be supported by reliable knowledge accumulated from diverse sources of evaluated evidence on different aspects of species ecology and phenology.…”