Insects, essential to many vital ecosystem processes, are declining worldwide due to threats from climate change and habitat loss. While species-specific conservation action can help, the massive diversity of insects renders such efforts too slow and expensive.
This study explores how protected areas (PAs) may instead help safeguard habitats and protect insects at a general level. By coupling insect distributions derived from GBIF-mediated occurrence records of nearly 90,000 species with global PA coverage maps, researchers quantified overlapping areas to measure insect representation.
Using a target threshold set according to calculated range sizes for each species, the authors predicted that PA coverage falls short for more than 75 per cent of insects. The entire global distribution of about 1,800 species fell outside any PAs. Mean coverage by PAs across all species was about 19 per cent.
Geographically speaking, the highest proportions of species reaching target PA coverage was in northern South America, most of Africa, western Europe and western Australia while many species in North America and most of Asia fell short of targets.
The authors acknowledged that the results are influenced by narrowly distributed species that are poorly surveyed. As the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) drives new ambition for PA growth, the study calls for designating areas that specifically consider insect conservation.