Global conservation planning overlooks the tropics, home to most insect species, study finds

More than four out of every five insect species on Earth live in the tropics, but the scientific and policy machinery built to protect them is concentrated almost entirely in temperate countries thousands of miles away, according to a framework published this week in the journal BioScience. The paper, led by ecologist Shawan Chowdhury of Monash University's Global Change Ecology Lab, draws on a review of tropical insect research worldwide and a detailed case study of Bangladesh to argue that global conservation planning has a structural blind spot precisely where insect diversity is highest.

The study does not report a new species or a single alarming population collapse. Instead, it audits the evidence base itself, and finds it thin, scattered and skewed toward wealthy nations, even as tropical insects underpin food production, pollination and the diets of most of the world's land vertebrates. Eleven researchers from Australia, Bangladesh, Uganda, Hong Kong, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Italy and India contributed to the analysis, which the authors also posted in manuscript form on the preprint server EcoEvoRxiv as part of the paper's open-review record.

The numbers behind the gap

The paper's starting point, as Monash University's summary of the findings distributed through ScienceDaily makes clear, is a stark asymmetry in where insect data comes from versus where insects actually live. An estimated 14 million to 30 million insect species exist, the large majority undocumented, and more than 80 percent occur in tropical regions. Yet the authors calculate that nearly 26 percent of all insect distribution records held by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, the main international clearinghouse for species-occurrence data, originate from the United Kingdom alone — a country that holds a small fraction of global insect diversity.

The Bangladesh case study, built to test whether the imbalance could be corrected with existing information, illustrates how deep the gap runs. The team found 111 studies relevant to the country's butterflies, but only 34 had been published in international journals where they would be visible to global assessors. Informal sources filled some of the void: Facebook groups run by local naturalists held usable occurrence records for 167 of 169 nationally threatened butterfly species, more than formal databases captured. Despite that grassroots documentation, only one of 226 assessed butterfly species had adequate coverage inside Bangladesh's existing protected areas, and the authors calculate that 62 percent of the country's butterfly species qualify as nationally threatened. Zoomed out to Europe, they cite a still-startling figure: just 0.12 percent of European insect species carry any form of legal protection. Globally, the authors estimate that 76 percent of insect species are inadequately represented within existing protected-area networks, meaning the reserves nominally set aside to safeguard biodiversity were drawn up with almost no reference to where insects themselves are concentrated.

Parachute science and a policy deadline

The paper's title borrows a term long used in tropical biology: "parachute science," in which researchers from wealthy countries fly in, collect specimens or data, and leave without building local capacity or crediting local scientists as full partners. Chowdhury and his co-authors argue that pattern has left tropical countries chronically short of the taxonomists, museum infrastructure and long-term monitoring programs needed to assess their own insect faunas, even as those countries hold the overwhelming share of the diversity at stake. The review identifies four linked obstacles: research on tropical insects is poorly indexed and hard to find even when it exists; the underlying occurrence data are sparse; scientific infrastructure such as reference collections and trained taxonomists is inadequate; and conservation action rarely follows from what evidence there is.

The timing is not incidental. Under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the treaty adopted when nearly 200 countries agreed in December 2022 to protect 30 percent of the planet's land and seas by 2030, signatory nations are now assembling the national biodiversity plans and monitoring systems meant to track progress toward that target. Insects, the paper argues, are being left out of that accounting almost by default: vertebrates and plants dominate red-list assessments and protected-area planning, while six-legged animals that outnumber all other species combined go largely unmeasured. Without better tropical insect data, the authors write, national governments cannot credibly report whether the 30 percent target is protecting the habitats and species that most need it.

"We cannot effectively conserve species if we don't know what is there."

That line from Chowdhury, delivered in comments distributed with the paper's release and reported by Mirage News, captures the study's central claim: the crisis facing tropical insects is as much an information crisis as an ecological one. Chowdhury, who heads Monash's Global Change Ecology Lab, has argued that the gap is not primarily a matter of needing more raw data collection but of connecting and using knowledge that, in many cases, already exists in scattered, non-English-language or informal form.

Who the gap affects, and what comes next

The consequences of the blind spot fall first on the countries and communities that live closest to tropical insect diversity. Farmers across South and Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America depend on insect pollinators for crops and on natural pest control that insect predators provide; the paper notes that insects pollinate more than 80 percent of wild flowering plants and supply the food base for roughly 60 percent of bird species, linking insect declines to broader losses in agriculture and biodiversity that would be felt well beyond entomology. Conservation scientists based in tropical countries are affected directly too: the study's authors say they are frequently sidelined in international collaborations that treat them as field labor rather than intellectual partners, even when the data and specimens originate entirely within their home countries.

Government biodiversity agencies preparing national reports under the Kunming-Montreal framework are another audience the authors are explicitly trying to reach, since those agencies currently have little standardized insect data to draw on when designating protected areas or setting conservation priorities. And the paper is aimed as well at the journals, databases and funding bodies that decide which research becomes visible internationally, since the Bangladesh figures suggest a great deal of usable local science currently never reaches the platforms global assessments rely on.

The imbalance also shapes which insects get studied at all. Charismatic pollinators such as butterflies and bees attract disproportionate research attention relative to less conspicuous groups, including dung beetles, ants and aquatic insects, that perform equally critical ecological work moving nutrients, aerating soil and controlling pest populations. Because assessment capacity in the tropics is so limited, the paper warns, entire functional groups of insects could decline or disappear from a given region without triggering any formal conservation response, simply because no monitoring program exists to notice the change before it happens.

Rather than simply calling for more fieldwork, the framework proposes a specific fix: integrate conventional peer-reviewed research with regional and non-English-language literature, museum specimen records, citizen-science platforms, social media observations such as the Bangladesh Facebook groups, and emerging tools including AI-assisted image identification, while investing directly in local taxonomic training and long-term monitoring capacity in the countries where the insects actually live. The authors describe this as building "locally led" research partnerships rather than extractive ones, with foreign collaborators supporting infrastructure and authorship rather than simply removing data.

What happens next depends largely on uptake outside the scientific literature. The framework itself carries no regulatory force; it is a proposed methodology, not a mandate, and its authors are now working to apply it in additional tropical countries beyond the Bangladesh pilot. Whether national governments preparing biodiversity plans ahead of the 2030 deadline choose to fold insects into that planning, and whether journals and funders act on the paper's call to make tropical research more visible and more equitably credited, remains an open question the authors say they intend to keep pressing in the run-up to the next United Nations biodiversity conference.