Technological advancements in biological monitoring have facilitated the study of insect communities at unprecedented spatial scales. The progress allows more comprehensive coverage of the diversity ...within a given area while minimizing disturbance and reducing the need for extensive human labour. Compared with traditional methods, these novel technologies offer the opportunity to examine biological patterns that were previously beyond our reach. However, to address the pressing scientific inquiries of the future, data must be easily accessible, interoperable and reusable for the global research community. Biodiversity information standards and platforms provide the necessary infrastructure to standardize and share biodiversity data. This paper explores the possibilities and prerequisites of publishing insect data obtained through novel monitoring methods through GBIF, the most comprehensive global biodiversity data infrastructure. We describe the essential components of metadata standards and existing data standards for occurrence data on insects, including data extensions. By addressing the current opportunities, limitations, and future development of GBIF's publishing framework, we hope to encourage researchers to both share data and contribute to the further development of biodiversity data standards and publishing models. Wider commitments to open data initiatives will promote data interoperability and support cross-disciplinary scientific research and key policy indicators. This article is part of the theme issue 'Towards a toolkit for global insect biodiversity monitoring'.
Monitoring insects across space and time is challenging, due to their vast taxonomic and functional diversity. This study demonstrates how nets mounted on rooftops of cars (car nets) and DNA ...metabarcoding can be applied to sample flying insect richness and diversity across large spatial scales within a limited time period. During June 2018, 365 car net samples were collected by 151 volunteers during two daily time intervals on 218 routes in Denmark. Insect bulk samples were processed with a DNA metabarcoding protocol to estimate taxonomic composition, and the results were compared to known flying insect richness and occurrence data. Insect and hoverfly richness and diversity were assessed across biogeographic regions and dominant land cover types. We detected 15 out of 19 flying insect orders present in Denmark, with high proportions of especially Diptera compared to Danish estimates, and lower insect richness and diversity in urbanized areas. We detected 319 species not known for Denmark and 174 species assessed in the Danish Red List. Our results indicate that the methodology can assess the flying insect fauna at large spatial scales to a wide extent, but may be, like other methods, biased towards certain insect orders.
Anthropogenic land cover change is a major driver of biodiversity loss, with urbanisation and farmland practices responsible for some of the most drastic modifications of natural habitats. The ...relative importance of different land covers for shaping insect communities, however, is unclear.
This study examines the effect of urban and farmland covers, along with land cover heterogeneity, at a landscape scale on species richness, evenness and biomass of flying insects using citizen science carnet sampling across Denmark.
Increasing urban cover had a negative effect on insect richness but an even stronger negative effect on biomass. Increased land cover heterogeneity did not mitigate the negative effect of urban cover. Insect assemblages also became more even with increased urban cover. Farmland cover had no significant effect on insect richness, evenness or biomass.
Based on our findings, the urban cover has a strong negative impact on insect communities, indicating that urbanisation could contribute to insect declines. Moreover, our findings indicate that insect loss occurs more through loss of biomass than loss of species, which may affect the ecosystem‐level consequences of urbanisation.
We examined the effect of urban and farmland covers, along with land cover heterogeneity, at a landscape scale on species richness, evenness and biomass of flying insects using citizen science carnet sampling across Denmark.
Increasing urban cover had a negative effect on insect richness but an even stronger negative effect on biomass. Insect assemblages also became more even with increased urban cover.
Farmland cover had no significant effect on insect richness, evenness or biomass.
Aim
In this study, we assessed the importance of local‐ to landscape‐scale effects of land cover and land use on flying insect biomass.
Location
Denmark and parts of Germany.
Methods
We used ...rooftop‐mounted car nets in a citizen science project (“InsectMobile”) to allow for large‐scale geographic sampling of flying insects. Volunteers sampled insects along 278 five‐km routes in urban, farmland, grassland, wetland and forest landscapes in the summer of 2018. The bulk insect samples were dried overnight to obtain the sample biomass. We extracted proportional land use variables in buffers between 50 and 1,000 m along the routes and compiled them into land cover categories to examine the effect of each land cover, and specific land use types, on insect biomass.
Results
We found a negative association between urban cover and flying insect biomass (1% increase in urban cover = 1% 95% CI: −3.0 to 0.0 decrease in biomass in Denmark, and a 3% 95% CI: −3.0 to 0.0 decrease in Germany) at a landscape scale (1,000‐m buffer). In Denmark, we also found positive effects of semi‐natural land cover types, that is protected grassland (largest at the landscape scale, 1000 m) and forests (largest at intermediate scales, 250 m). Protected grassland cover had a stronger positive effect on insect biomass than forest cover did. For farmland cover, the positive association with insect biomass was not clearly modified by any variable associated with farmland use intensity. The negative association between insect biomass and urban land cover appeared to be reduced by increased urban green space.
Main conclusions
Our results show that land cover has an impact on flying insect biomass with the magnitude of this effect varying across spatial scales. However, the vast expanse of grey space in urbanized areas has a direct negative impact on flying insect biomass across all spatial scales examined.
DNA sequencing efforts of environmental and other biological samples disclose unprecedented and largely untapped opportunities for advances in the taxonomy, ecology, and geographical distributions of ...our living world. To realise this potential, DNA-derived occurrence data (notably sequences with dates and coordinates) – much like traditional specimens and observations – need to be discoverable and interpretable through biodiversity data platforms. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) recently headed a community effort to assemble a set of guidelines for publishing DNA-derived data. These guidelines target the principles and approaches of exposing DNA-derived occurrence data in the context of broader biodiversity data. They cover a choice of terms using a controlled vocabulary, common pitfalls, and good practices, without going into platform-specific details. Our hope is that they will benefit anyone interested in better exposure of DNA-derived occurrence data through general biodiversity data platforms, including national biodiversity portals. This paper provides a brief rationale and an overview of the guidelines, an up-to-date version of which is maintained at https://doi.org/10.35035/doc-vf1a-nr22. User feedback and interaction are encouraged as new techniques and best practices emerge.
The design and successful performance of citizen science-based monitoring require an understanding of the motivation and the needs of participants. Herem we use a questionnaire to assess intrinsic ...and extrinsic motivations and investigate in links between project support service and motivations in 181 participants taking part in three insect-focused citizen science projects in Denmark, Germany and Israel. Across all three countries, main intrinsic motivation for participating in the projects were “to have fun” and to “do something (good) for nature”. Equally important across all countries were extrinsic motivations such as “contribute to science” and “contribute to nature conservation”. Interestingly, differences in the projects (country or program-type) were more strongly related to respondent's motivation than demographic variables such as age and gender. Linking project support services to participants' intrinsic and extrinsic motivations revealed that the intrinsic motivation of “feeling a part of the community” as well as the extrinsic motivation “learning” and the service to provide “training on insect identification” were positively related. Interestingly, the support service of “monetary incentives” was negatively related with the motivation to “conserve species generally” and “conserve insects specifically”. We conclude, that early identification of the citizen scientists' motivation and the assessment of how motivations may change over time are important to foster successful and sustainable citizen science monitoring programs. International networks of (potentially similar) biodiversity monitoring schemes should consider differences in cultural background and citizen scientist's requirements, and accordingly tailor the projects designs to activate, train, and support participants according to their needs.
Insects are the most diverse group of animals on Earth, but their small size and high diversity have always made them challenging to study. Recent technological advances have the potential to ...revolutionise insect ecology and monitoring. We describe the state of the art of four technologies (computer vision, acoustic monitoring, radar, and molecular methods), and assess their advantages, current limitations, and future potential. We discuss how these technologies can adhere to modern standards of data curation and transparency, their implications for citizen science, and their potential for integration among different monitoring programmes and technologies. We argue that they provide unprecedented possibilities for insect ecology and monitoring, but it will be important to foster international standards via collaboration.
Most users will foresee the use of genetic sequences in the context of molecular ecology or phylogenetic research, however, a sequence with coordinates and a timestamp is a valuable biodiversity ...occurrence that is useful in a much broader context than its original purpose. To uncover this potential, sequence-derived data need to become findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable through generalist biodiversity data platforms. Stimulated by the Biodiversity_Next discussions in 2019, we have worked for about 10 months to put together practical data mapping and data publishing experiences in Norway, Australia, Sweden, and Denmark, as well as in the UNITE and the GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) networks. The resulting guide was put together to provide practical instruction for mapping sequence-derived data.
Biodiversity data communities remain dominated by the macroscopic, easily detectable, morphologically identifiable species. This is not only true for citizen science and other forms of biodiversity popularization, but is also visible in the university and museum department structures, financial resource allocations, biodiversity legislation, and policy design. Recent decades of molecular advances have increased the power of genetic methods for detecting, describing, and documenting global biodiversity. We have yet to see the wide shift of data generating efforts from the traditional taxonomic foci of biodiversity assesments to the more balanced and inclusive systems focusing on all functionally important taxa and environments. These include soil, limnic and marine environments, decomposing plants and deadwood, and all life therein. Environmental DNA data enable recording of present and past presence of micro- and macroscopic organisms with minimal effort and by non-invasive methods. The apparent ease of these methods requires a cautious approach to the resulting data and their interpretation.
It remains important to define and agree on the organism recording and reporting routines for genetic data. DNA data represent a major addition to the many ways in which GBIF and other biodiversity data platforms index the living world. Our guide is resting on the shoulders of those who have been developing and improving MIxS (Minimum Information about any (x) Sequence), GGBN (Global Genome Biodiversity Network) and other data standards. The added value of publishing sequence-derived data through non-genetic biodiversity discovery platforms relates to spatio-temporal occurrences and sequence-based names. Reporting sequence-derived occurrences in an open and reproducible way has a wide range of benefits: notably, it increases citability, highlights the taxa concerned in the context of biological conservation, and contributes to taxonomic and ecological knowledge.
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