Protected areas do not guarantee preservation of 76% of insects

Environmental protection areas (PAs) do not guarantee the preservation of more than three-quarters of the global diversity of insects, reveals an international study published this Wednesday (1st).

According to the survey, of the 89,151 insect species for which there is information about their presence or not in protected areas, 76% (67,384) do not show a clear benefit of species preservation due to the protection areas.

Insects that live in forests in North America, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and Australasia (a geographic region comprising Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea and some islands in the Pacific and Oceania) are the ones that enjoy the least protection in PAs.

This occurs because the criteria necessary for the preservation of the species —such as its wide distribution area, the presence of resources such as water and food for development, the place where the larvae grow— are not guaranteed in the analyzed protection areas.

Even more serious, around 1,900 species of the 225 families of the group are not even found in preservation areas, indicating a possible direct threat to their preservation.

In contrast, protected areas in the Amazon, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Central Europe, western Australia and almost all of the Neotropical region ensured greater protection from insects.

The findings were published in this Wednesday’s (1st) edition of the scientific journal One Earth, from the Cell group. The study is signed by researchers from the German Center for Research in Integrative Biodiversity (iDiv), Leipzig, Germany, the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Queensland, and the Division of Ecology and Evolution at the Australian National University, in Canberra, both in Australia. .

To assess the impact of protected areas on the preservation of insect species, the scientists calculated the coverage of protected areas in square kilometers and considered how much of the geographical distribution area of ​​mapped species overlapped with protected areas.

The more inside the protected area, the greater the preservation of the species. The less protected, the more outside the area was the geographic distribution of the species.

According to the research, only 3 of the approximately 28 known lineages of insects had a protected area greater than 25% (Strepsiptera, Grylloblattodea and Plecoptera), while three other groups (Mantophasmatodea, Phthiraptera and Thysanoptera) had less than 15% protection.

Here it is worth an addendum, noted by the authors themselves, that insects that have a very limited geographic distribution can be influenced (positively) if they are totally within a protected area, while those with very wide distribution areas can be harmed.

Considering the global average of insects, however, about 19.24% are within protected areas. Worldwide, protected areas comprise just over 15% of land.

For the conservation biologist and first author of the study, Shawan Chowdhury, a surprising fact is the lack of information about insect species in protected areas.

“Many conservation studies use data from the IUCN Red List [União Internacional para Conservação da Natureza], but only about 8% of all insect species make the list. This makes it even more difficult to define insect conservation policies,” he says.

Scientists have been warning of declining global insect populations for years. According to the survey, there are 5.5 million species of insects, but information on the conservation status of protected areas exists for just under 90,000 (1.6%).

This low representation of insects in conservation studies, according to the author, led to an appeal made by scientists to the coordinators of the extinction lists.

“Insects are also very diverse, with diverse habitats. Some species prefer areas of forested vegetation, others will prefer savannah vegetation or open fields. This must also be considered when defining protected areas, to be able to include this diversity of animals “, he explains.

According to the biologist, even when guaranteed by the area of ​​environmental protection, many insects continue to face population declines with the advance of deforestation and the loss of vegetation in adjacent areas.

“Various measures can be taken, and the first one is to curb deforestation and global warming, as these bring direct impacts on the conservation of insects. COP15 [Convenção Mundial da Biodiversidade da ONU, que ocorreu em Montreal no fim do ano passado] defined that protected areas increase from 15% to 30% by 2030. This measure will certainly help in the preservation of endemic insect species and increase the global coverage of insect protection”, he concludes.