Insect Conservation and Diversity

Virtual Issue - The spatial distribution and detection of insect diversity - where are they and how can we find them? - November 2009

The spatial distribution and detection of insect diversity - where are they and how can we find them? - November 2009

Understanding how communities are structured and interact is of paramount importance to ecologists and conservation biologists. To address important questions in this field it is first necessary to know how many organisms you are dealing with, how they are distributed within the landscape and how they interact with each other. Issues related to geographical range and the scale of observations are clearly significant in this context. Interpretation of the observed patterns can, however, depend sensitively on the efficiency and reliablility of the sampling methods used. Moreover, reliable analytical methods are crucial to deal efficiently with the sizeable data-sets generated by diversity studies. These factors are all the more relevant for insects and allied organisms due to their small size, huge species richness and relative vagility (as opposed to plants), and the fact that, relatively speaking, their ecology and taxonomy are poorly understood. This virtual issue highlights the types of questions we need to be addressing in the study of insect diversity and the methods that can be used to help us answer them.

Where within a geographical range do species survive best? A matter of scale
Chris D. Thomas, Caroline R. Bulman, Robert J. Wilson

The effectiveness and optimal use of Malaise traps for monitoring parasitoid wasps
Sally E. M. Fraser, Calvin Dytham, Peter J. Mayhew

Effects of mobility on daily attraction to light traps: comparison between lepidopteran and coleopteran communities
Toshihide Hirao, Masashi Murakami, Akira Kashizaki

Rapid biodiversity assessment of spiders (Araneae) using semi-quantitative sampling: a case study in a Mediterranean forest
Pedro Cardoso, Nikolaj Scharff, Clara Gaspar, Sérgio S. Henriques, Rui Carvalho, Pedro H. Castro, Jesper B. Schmidt, Israel Silva, Tamás Szüts, Alberto De Castro, Luis C. Crespo

Estimating species diversity in a guild of Neotropical skippers (Lepidoptera: Hesperiidae) with artificial lures is a sampling problem
Philip J. Devries, George T. Austin, Noland H. Martin

A randomisation program to compare species-richness values
Jean M. L. Richardson, Miriam H. Richards

Diversity and evenness from sequential sightings
L. M. Cook

Elevational changes in the composition of insects and other terrestrial arthropods at tropical latitudes: a comparison of multiple sampling methods and social spider diets
Jennifer Guevara, Leticia Avilés

Rapid assessments of tropical dung beetle and butterfly assemblages: contrasting trends along a forest disturbance gradient
Lucy Hayes, Darren J. Mann, Alexander L. Monastyrskii, Owen T. Lewis

Choice of metrics for studying arthropod responses to habitat disturbance: one example from Gabon
Yves Basset, Olivier Missa, Alfonso Alonso, Scott E. Miller, Gianfranco Curletti, Marc De Meyer, Connal Eardley, Owen T. Lewis, Mervyn W. Mansell, Vojtech Novotny, Thomas Wagner

Spatial distribution of rare species in lotic habitats
John W. McCreadie, Peter H. Adler

Distribution of burnet moths (Zygaena spp.) in relation to larval and adult resources on two spatial scales
Erik Öckinger