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Abstract
Many insect species are facing existential crises, primarily due to diverse human-induced activities. Most insect assessments, however, are based on short-term data or some iconic species. Here, in close collaboration with taxonomic experts from natural history societies, we compiled the best available occurrence data for ground beetles in Germany, estimated the changes in species occupancy over the last 36 years, and related these changes to the traits/characteristics of these species. We obtained trends for 383 species and found that 52% of species significantly declined, and 22% significantly increased in site occupancy. The remainder of the species (26%) all showed a mean negative trend, albeit nonsignificant. Interestingly, non-threatened species declined at a similar rate to the threatened species, with 64% of the Near Threatened species experiencing significant declines (highest among all red list categories). Across all traits, we found that large (compared to medium) and omnivore (compared to predator) species declined less. Considering that ground beetles are key predators in many ecosystems and in agricultural systems that play an important role in pest control and in the food chain, their decline should raise concerns. Thus, we urgently plead for more harmonised and systematic monitoring of this insect group.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.32942/X2XS66
Subjects
Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Keywords
citizen science, Insect conservation, insect decline, insect monitoring, long-term change, occupancy detection model, Trend Analysis
Dates
Published: 2024-09-18 19:43
License
CC BY Attribution 4.0 International
Additional Metadata
Language:
English
Conflict of interest statement:
NA
Data and Code Availability Statement:
The trend estimates, trait information and threatened status, are available in the online supplementary material. All the R scripts are available in the public GitHub repository (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/occ_model_de-15DF/).
There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article.