How complete are insect inventories? An assessment of the british butterfly database highlighting the influence of dynamic distribution shifts on sampling completeness

Much recent scientific, media and public attention has focussed on the evidence for and consequences of declines in insect biodiversity. Reliable, complete inventories can be used to estimate insect trends accurately, but incomplete data may distort assessments of biodiversity change. Thus, it is es...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Biodiversity and conservation 2021-03, Vol.30 (3), p.889-902
Main Authors: Sánchez-Fernández, David, Fox, Richard, Dennis, Roger L. H., Lobo, Jorge M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Biodiversity
Biodiversity loss
Biological diversity
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Butterflies
Butterflies & moths
Climate change
Climate Change/Climate Change Impacts
Climatic changes
Completeness
Conservation Biology/Ecology
Distribution
Ecology
Information management
Insects
Inventories
Life Sciences
Original Paper
Range extension
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Summary:Much recent scientific, media and public attention has focussed on the evidence for and consequences of declines in insect biodiversity. Reliable, complete inventories can be used to estimate insect trends accurately, but incomplete data may distort assessments of biodiversity change. Thus, it is essential to understand the completeness of insect inventories. Assessing the database of Great Britain butterfly occurrences, likely the most complete database for any group of insects in the world (with 10,046,366 records for 58 butterfly species), we found that only 62% of the cells have complete inventories at the finest scale evaluated. The dynamic nature of butterfly distributions in response to climate change could explain this result, as the distribution of completeness values is related to the increasing occurrence of some species at higher latitudes as a consequence of recent range expansions. The exceptional quantity of information collected in Great Britain about this appealing group of insects is insufficient to provide a complete picture. Consequently, we cannot expect to build complete inventories for less popular taxa, especially in less comprehensively sampled countries, and will require other techniques to understand the full extent of global biodiversity loss.
ISSN:0960-3115
1572-9710
DOI:10.1007/s10531-021-02122-w