They might comprise close to 75% of all known animal species. But when it comes to the monitoring and protection of insects, global efforts have been inadequate. The numbers tell a harrowing story. A global review of insect populations published in 2019 in the journal Biological Conservation found that 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction, which could lead to “a catastrophic collapse” of ecosystems worldwide. “Most insects are relatively uninteresting for humans,” Roel van Klink, senior researcher at the Biodiversity Synthesis Research Group at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research, told Mongabay in a video interview. “It’s very laborious work, and society has not been willing to pay for the time that it actually needs to do this well.” Even as technology is being increasingly deployed to study and monitor insects globally, van Klink said he realized that groups developing these tools were often unaware of developments in other spheres. “It seemed that they were not talking to each other,” he said. “There were parallel developments in different countries.” As a first step toward addressing this concern and to get people to collaborate, van Klink brought together a group of scientists, researchers and technologists working on insect biodiversity. Working with them, he and a team collected, compiled and edited a special issue of studies titled “Towards a toolkit for global insect biodiversity monitoring” that was published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The issue comprises research from 142 authors in 27 countries with a…This article was originally published on Mongabay
The post Reimagining insect research: Interview with Roel van Klink and Leandro Nascimento first appeared on EnviroLink Network.