Grand challenges in entomology: Priorities for action in the coming decades

Abstract Entomology is key to understanding terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems at a time of unprecedented anthropogenic environmental change and offers substantial untapped potential to benefit humanity in a variety of ways, from improving agricultural practices to managing vector‐borne diseases and inspiring technological advances. We identified high priority challenges for entomology using an inclusive, open, and democratic four‐stage prioritisation approach, conducted among the membership and affiliates (hereafter ‘members’) of the UK‐based Royal Entomological Society (RES). A list of 710 challenges was gathered from 189 RES members. Thematic analysis was used to group suggestions, followed by an online vote to determine initial priorities, which were subsequently ranked during an online workshop involving 37 participants. The outcome was a set of 61 priority challenges within four groupings of related themes: (i) ‘Fundamental Research’ (themes: Taxonomy, ‘Blue Skies’ [defined as research ideas without immediate practical application], Methods and Techniques); (ii) ‘Anthropogenic Impacts and Conservation’ (themes: Anthropogenic Impacts, Conservation Options); (iii) ‘Uses, Ecosystem Services and Disservices’ (themes: Ecosystem Benefits, Technology and Resources [use of insects as a resource, or as inspiration], Pests); (iv) ‘Collaboration, Engagement and Training’ (themes: Knowledge Access, Training and Collaboration, Societal Engagement). Priority challenges encompass research questions, funding objectives, new technologies, and priorities for outreach and engagement. Examples include training taxonomists, establishing a global network of insect monitoring sites, understanding the extent of insect declines, exploring roles of cultivated insects in food supply chains, and connecting professional with amateur entomologists. Responses to different challenges could be led by amateur and professional entomologists, at all career stages. Overall, the challenges provide a diverse array of options to inspire and initiate entomological activities and reveal the potential of entomology to contribute to addressing global challenges related to human health and well‐being, and environmental change.


INTRODUCTION
Insects are the most diverse animal group within terrestrial ecosystems, with about 1 million species currently described, and the total number of species estimated to be around 5.5 million (Stork, 2018).
As well as being diverse, they are also very abundant and play critical roles in ecosystems, including as predators, prey, decomposers, and pollinators (Losey & Vaughan, 2006;Wilson, 1987). Several of these functional roles provide crucial ecosystem services to humans, including aiding removal of waste materials such as carrion and dung, contributing to nutrient cycling and soil processing, and pollinating 75% of the world's major food crops (Klein et al., 2007), including those plants responsible for >90% of vitamin C available for human nutrition (Eilers et al., 2011). Insects can provide us directly with food or be used as food for livestock (van Huis, 2013) and have played a valuable role in the development of life saving medicines such as antimicrobial and anticancer agents (Medeiros Costa-Neto, 2005). They have inspired technological innovations, including advances in robotics, adhesives, and optics (Gorb, 2011). However, in addition to this wide range of positive contributions to human society, insects are also pests and vectors for disease. Arthropods-of which insects are the major component-are estimated to destroy between 18% and 26% of agricultural crop production annually across the world (Culliney, 2014;Sharma et al., 2017), whilst some insect groups cause substantial damage to forests (Bentz et al., 2019), wooden infrastructure (Govorushko, 2019), furnishings and clothing (Plarre & Krüger-Carstensen, 2011). It is estimated that 17% of infectious diseases in humans are vector-borne, and many of these including dengue, typhus, tick-borne encephalitis, and sleeping sickness, are transmitted by insect and allied vectors (World Health Organization, 2020a). Understanding, supporting, and responding to the myriad roles that insects play in ecosystems, and the services and disservices that they cause for humans, demands well-developed scientific knowledge of the taxon. Entomology is the scientific discipline and branch of natural history that seeks to understand the ecology, physiology, distribution, and classification of insects. It includes a broad range of topics, including medical and veterinary entomology, pest control, and insect ecology and conservation, and has been facilitated by key scientific developments such as the invention of the microscope, and the Linnaean classification system (Leather, 2015;Smith & Kennedy, 2009).
In recent decades, molecular techniques have provided further opportunities for understanding insects (e.g. DNA barcoding ;Jinbo et al., 2011), and new techniques capable of further transforming entomology are constantly emerging (e.g. deep learning and computer vision; Høye et al., 2021). In the 21st century, the rapid pace of anthropogenic change of ecosystems, global challenges such as climate change and widespread biodiversity loss (Díaz et al., 2019;Newbold et al., 2016;Wagner et al., 2021), and the continued emergence of new pests and invasive non-native species (Pyšek et al., 2020), all highlight the importance of further developing our understanding of insects, to maximise the benefits and minimise harm associated with them (Leather, 2015). We also need to continue our exploration of fundamental questions about life on Earth.
Entomological societies around the world are questioning the role that they, and their discipline, can play in developing strategies for the coming decades, including what entomologists can do for humanity, what entomology can achieve, and what directions the discipline could, and should, take next. To this end, the Entomological Society of America (ESA) initiated the 'Grand Challenges in Entomology' Project in 2017-a global initiative to develop 'An entomology agenda to improve the human condition' (https://entomologychallenges.org/). The ESA's focus was on resolving insect-related problems or using insects to develop solutions to the 'grand challenges' humans will face in coming decades. Their priorities were decided by the society's board members and concentrated on three overarching strategic challenges-Public Health, Feed the World, and Invasive Species. As a response to the 'Grand Challenges' initiative, The Royal Entomological Society (RES)-a UK-based entomological society, comprising 1598 members from around the world, and from a wide range of professional backgrounds-began its own complementary 'Grand Challenges in Entomology' programme to contribute ideas, using an alternative approach based on broad consultation of the membership, and inclusion of a wide range of topics. The aim was to generate a list of specific ideas for action, which would sit alongside the ESA's list, and those of other organisations contributing to the initiative, to provide a range of options and perspectives, to help develop an entomological agenda for the 21st century.
Through the 'Grand Challenges' programme, the RES plans to develop a range of ideas to inspire and direct future work around the world. The first stage, reported here, has been to engage with a wide range of entomologists with differing specialities and interests, drawn from the RES's membership and others involved in its activities. The RES's desire for inclusivity and to draw on this breadth of expertise meant that a participatory, or collaborative methodology was appropriate (sensu lato Sutherland et al., 2011), based on principles of openness and democracy, which aimed to gather a broad set of opinions from different perspectives.
Collaborative exercises to set research priorities bring together multiple stakeholder or informed groups to identify priority questions or information needs for new research, engagement, or activities.
They are useful for aligning research with policy and practice and for developing consensus among researchers and practitioners (Dey et al., 2020;Rudd, 2011). Such exercises typically include 'solicitation of questions and priorities from an extensive community, online collation of material, repeated voting and engagement with policy networks to foster uptake and application of the results' (Sutherland et al., 2011). The exact format of each exercise is case dependent and can be adjusted according to the aims, community, and resources available. A set of 41 examples from ecology, biodiversity and environmental science were reviewed in detail by Dey et al. (2020). They have been used successfully in many environmental science or policy contexts (Dicks, Bardgett, et al., 2013;Sutherland et al., 2021;zu Ermgassen et al., 2020), including to identify key knowledge needs for the conservation of wild insect pollinators (Dicks, Abrahams, et al., 2013).
In this article, we describe the collaborative exercise that was conducted by the RES to identify a range of current and future 'Grand Challenges in Entomology'. We explain the methods used to achieve this and present the key themes and final list of priority challenges that emerged from the exercise. We also begin to consider what this means for the direction that entomology should take, what F I G U R E 1 Flowchart representation of the collaborative prioritisation exercise. Boxes on the left describe stages of the process. Square brackets show how many people were involved in prioritisation steps at each stage; only scorers are counted in Stage 4, not including the steering group, facilitators and scribes. Boxes on the right show the outputs of each stage. At Stage 3, most suggested challenges (numbers in round brackets) were voted for by participants in the online survey; seven were saved subsequently as 'wildcards' (see text), despite receiving no online votes. For further details of Stage 4, see Figure S1. entomologists can do for society, and what entomology can achieve in the coming decades.

METHODS
We followed a structured collaborative process with four stages ( Figure 1, Appendix S1, and Figure S1). The key aspects of each stage and subsequent data analysis and visualisation are outlined below, with additional method details in the Appendix S1.

Stage 1: Gathering suggested challenges
We invited all RES members and fellows, including journal editorial teams and special interest group members (1598 people, from across 51 different countries-hereafter referred to collectively as 'members') to submit suggestions for Grand Challenges, which were defined as 'Priority topics on which you think entomologists should focus their efforts over the coming years and decades'. We asked them to consider how they saw the future of entomology, what they thought entomologists should be concentrating their efforts on, and also what entomology could achieve, and to suggest challenges specific enough for a programme of activities or research to be designed around. We limited the suggestion length to 280 characters, and each member was allowed to submit up to five ideas. Participants were asked a series of demographic questions, comprising details about their involvement with the RES, their gender, age, country of residence, main current category of entomological activity (e.g. university academic, private sector, policy maker, amateur entomologist, etc), RES journal preferences, and years of experience as an entomologist.
Data were collected between 29 October and 20 November 2020 using the online survey software Qualtrics (Qualtrics, Provo, UT). Full wording of the Stage 1 online survey is available in Appendix S2.
Before moving to Stage 2, demographic data of respondents were analysed (see Section Data analysis and visualisation) to check that a representative subset of the members had been surveyed. The results (see Section Results) were discussed by the steering group and were considered to be representative, with no need for further targeted action to increase responses from under-represented groups. independently read the full list of suggested challenges and manually developed a thematic framework for grouping them. The same four researchers independently sorted successive subsets of 50 of the suggested challenges, allocating each to a theme within the agreed framework. Agreement in how the challenges were sorted into themes was assessed using Kappa analyses (see Appendix S1 for details). Once the researchers were sorting with sufficient consistency, the remaining 610 suggestions were sorted by a single team member (S.H.L.).

Stage 2: Processing suggested challenges
Duplicate suggestions were then amalgamated by S.H.L. to avoid repetition within the list of suggestions (Fleiss et al., 2004;Gamer et al., 2019).
In a final processing step (carried out by two of the authors: A.W. and S.H.L.), some suggested challenges relevant to more than one theme were moved to the theme containing fewest suggestions to reduce variability in the number of suggested challenges per theme.
One theme ('Insect declines and conservation') was split into its two component parts, to even out theme sizes for Stages 3 and 4.

Stage 3: Prioritising suggested challenges
The 1256 RES members on the RES mailing list (including nonrespondents at Stage 1, excluding journal editorial teams and special interest group members) were invited to participate in a second online Qualtrics survey, run between 24 June and 8 July 2021, to begin prioritising suggested challenges.
Each participant prioritised suggested challenges from two of the themes from Stage 2: one which they felt they had expertise in, and a second that was randomly assigned, to ensure good coverage of responses across themes.
In each theme, participants were asked to read between 29 and 60 suggested challenges (depending on length of the suggestions list within each theme), presented in a randomised order, and to select the highest priority 10% from the set. Suggested challenges amalgamated from duplicates were indicated, and participants could access the original suggestions for these, to see where they came from. Free text boxes allowed participants to add comments on each challenge.
The survey included a set of demographic questions to assess the diversity of responses (as in Stage 1), and a question about willingness to participate in an online workshop, with specified dates, to prioritise the shortlisted challenges (Stage 4).

Stage 4: Prioritising shortlisted challenges
The final prioritisation took place during an online workshop conducted on 21 and 22 July 2021, using the video communications software Zoom (see Figure S1 and Table S1 for further details). Before the workshop, collated results from Stage 3 were shared with participants in spreadsheet form, with voter identities anonymised. The challenges that received the most votes within each theme (see Appendix S1, The first workshop day focused on within-theme prioritisation.
In theme breakout rooms, each suggested challenge was T A B L E 1 Final edited text of the selected priority challenges within each theme.

Theme
Priority challenge for entomology Landscape-scale conservation: consider insects in landscape-scale conservation planning and projects 6 2 2

Ecosystem Benefits
Insects' contributions to people: communicate and inform about the many different contributions that insects make to human well-being, for example through ecosystem services 1 A Q Understudied taxa: increase public understanding of understudied insect taxa (e.g. parasitic wasps and flies), their ecosystem functions and the benefits they provide to people and nature 2 A Q Soil biodiversity: research the role of biodiversity in soil health/quality, including food webs, species interactions and interdependencies.

Joint 3 AQ
Impacts of insect decline on ecosystem functions: quantify the effects of observed insect declines on ecosystem functions and services, including pollination, pest control and decomposition, and the resilience of networks to species loss

Joint 3 AQ
Role of insects in agroecosystems: quantify the role of insects in agroecosystems, including their role as pollinators, natural predators and decomposers, and comparing this across different farming systems, such as organic versus conventional 5 1 8 Ecosystem service values: calculate the values of ecosystem services less well studied than pollination, including biological pest control, soil improvement, biochemical processes, and the role of key insect groups such as parasitoids, carnivorous carabid beetles and ants

Joint 6 19
Managing for resilient insect communities: identify effective landscape and site-level interventions to ensure resilience in insect communities, in managed landscapes (other than nature reserves)

Joint 6 27
Technology and Resources Reducing pesticide exposure: develop and expand strategies to reduce the exposure of people to pesticides, to protect human health in all countries

Joint 6 13
Predicting and controlling pest outbreaks: determine drivers of pest outbreaks in agricultural, plantation and urban landscapes, and establish how they can be predicted and controlled sustainably 5 1 6 Semiochemicals and pheromones in pest management: improve monitoring and control of pest insects using semiochemicals and pheromones  Government policy: increase engagement of government policy makers with entomology and insect conservation, identify the best way to do this, and explore how entomological societies can play a more active role 5 1 0 Farming: improve engagement with the farming community to encourage the development of practices that benefit invertebrates 6 2 5 Note: The top-voted 10% of suggestions from Day 1 within-theme discussions were automatically added to the final list, with their ranking from these discussions shown as a number in the 'Day 1 results' column, and their final status as 'automatically qualifying' shown as AQ in the 'Day 2 results' column. The next top voted 10% of suggestions from Day 1 within-theme discussions were discussed further by all workshop participants in a Day 2 cross-theme discussion. The ranking given to each of these in Day 1 is given within the 'Day 1 results' column, but they are ordered according to their final ranking during the cross-theme discussions, shown in the 'Day 2 results' column. Only one priority challenge in the final list (marked ϕ ) passed from Stage 3 to Stage 4 as a 'wildcard'.
On Day 2, participants privately scored the importance of each suggested challenge following its discussion, as they had done on Day 1, and results were compiled to give an overall ranked list of suggested challenges from across all themes, to add to the final priority set. Suggested challenges discussed on Day 2 that were not ranked by any participant in their top five were removed.
The final list of challenges in entomology was therefore made up of suggested challenges that met the following criteria: •

RESULTS
Key results are outlined here, with additional details included within Appendix S3.

Involvement and scope
Stage 1

Stage 4: Prioritising shortlisted challenges
Online voting led to 235 suggestions being put forward to Stage 4, and seven wildcards were reintroduced on request from participants (Table S2), giving 242 suggestions in total. The workshop involved 54 participants (including RES members, workshop organisers, scribes, and facilitators), of whom 37 were entitled to vote (see Table S1). The 37 voting participants represented a wide cross-section of the membership (Figures S2 and S3) and was overall younger and more female skewed than the RES membership as a whole (age: χ 2 = 31.70, df = 6, p < 0.001; gender: χ 2 = 13.52, df = 1, p < 0.001), with the majority of participants under the age of 54, and an approximately equal male/female split. In line with the RES membership as a whole, the majority of participants were UK based (χ 2 = 5.0898, df = 10, p = 0.89), although there were representatives from seven different countries.
Participants in each of the above stages were most frequently University-affiliated academics and more likely to choose 'Ecological Entomology', 'Insect Conservation and Diversity', and 'Agricultural and Forest Entomology' as their preferred RES journals, although the full range of roles and journal preferences were always represented ( Figure S3).
Day 1 within-theme discussions contributed 31 suggestions to the final list, including one that made it to Stage 4 as a 'wildcard' ('Day 1 results' in Table 1); the across-theme discussion on Day 2 added an additional 30 suggestions ('Day 2 results' in Table 1). The final list of RES Grand Challenges in Entomology included 61 challenges.

Emerging themes and priority challenges
Eleven broad "Grand Challenge" themes emerged, which can be organised into four groupings of related themes ( Figure 2, Table S2). These are defined as: • The final list of 61 priority challenges contained a mix of suggestions across themes, and a diverse range of ideas ( Figure 2, Table 1). There was a positive relationship between the number of survey respondents who initially suggested a challenge and the likelihood of it making the final priority list (z value = 2.722, p = 0.00648; Appendix S3, Figure S4).

Fundamental research
Priority challenges in this group ranged across several fundamental science topics, with a strong emphasis on increased funding and capacity for such topics. There was also a focus on harnessing new technologies to better monitor insects and to extend networks of monitoring sites ( Figure 2,

Anthropogenic impacts and conservation
Priorities included a strong focus on quantifying, understanding, and reversing insect declines and community changes, and a range of landscape-scale approaches to help address this in different contexts and habitats ( Figure 2, Table 1, Table S2). Specific topics that were highlighted included the need to find out whether insect declines are happening globally, to understand what the main drivers of insect population changes are and whether these vary across biomes, and to determine insects' resilience to impacts and whether there are tipping points. There was also a focus on understanding the impact of climate change on insect movement and interactions, and the ecological consequences of any loss or changes in insect diversity as a result of anthropogenic impacts. Prioritised options for conservation included considering insects in landscape scale conservation projects and improving the design of agricultural landscapes and urban areasincluding options for 'retro-fitting' urban areas-to make them more insect-friendly. Developing understanding of the value of habitat corridors for insect movement and persistence, and the impacts of rewilding projects for insects were also highlighted.

Uses, ecosystem services, and disservices
Key emerging topics included a strong desire to better understand the role of insects in ecosystems, to develop their use to provide services for people, and also to find ways to increase peoples' awareness of the role of insects. Developing a better understanding of the role of insects as pests, and the need to find more sustainable ways of monitoring and controlling pest outbreaks were also prioritised ( Figure 2, Table 1, Table S2). There was a call for greater consideration of soil insect biodiversity and its role in pro-

Emerging priorities
Research-focused challenge areas included enhancing understanding of insect diversity, form and function (including biodiversity, communities, networks, interactions, pests, and taxonomy); anthropogenic F I G U R E 2 Schematic illustration of 11 "Grand Challenge" themes that emerged from the prioritisation process (light orange boxes, with grey outlines), organised within four broad topic groupings (dark orange boxes, with black outlines). The final list of priorities included 61 challenges spread across these themes. Number of challenges within each theme are shown in parentheses under each theme heading. All images are from NounProject.com. See Supplementary Materials Appendix S3 for a full list of credits.
impacts on insects (including declines, losses, agriculture and urban impacts, and climate change); and developing conservation solutions (including rewilding and landscape management). Priorities related to engaging wider society with insects and informing them of the key role insects play in human well-being also emerged strongly from the exercise. Some of these issues-such as pests-have been relatively well studied throughout the 20th century. However, others-such as anthropogenic impacts and conservation solutions-have been considered increasingly in recent years, and some are only just emerging on the entomological agenda. This includes issues that have recently hit the headlines, such as 'insect declines' (Didham et al., 2020;van Klink et al., 2020), entomophagy (de Carvalho et al., 2020), and the lack of natural history in education (Tewksbury et al., 2014). In the United Kingdom, a new 'Natural History' qualification for 16-yearolds has recently been announced, which provides one opportunity to enhance entomological education, but there are many others, throughout educational stages from pre-school onwards. topics related to needs for monitoring, training, encouragement, and funding to enable entomology to achieve its potential, in contributing to societal goals, were much more strongly highlighted. There was also consideration of the need to address diversity issues in entomology and to increase access to knowledge and training for disadvantaged groups, as well as giving greater consideration to supporting equitable interactions between scientists around the world. Among many possible reasons for this, the differences in scope could perhaps have been affected by setting differing aims for the end result (in terms of number of suggestions generated or focused on, and the specificity of these), the greater number and diversity of participants involved in the RES process, or a difference in priorities between the two societies, perhaps influenced by their geographic focus. Owing to the differences in approach taken, the ESA and RES lists of priorities are highly complementary, and together offer a diverse range of options for how to direct future actions.

Shortcomings and possible biases
Conducting a prioritisation process such as the RES Grand Challenges exercise has the advantage of being able to gather thoughts and opinions from a wide range of people with varying expertise. However, the contents of the final list inevitably depend on the views of participants at each stage, and so are vulnerable to the effects of selection and participation bias.
Biases could be apparent at various stages from the initial population who were invited to participate, the set of people who chose to complete the online surveys, and who chose to attend and speak out in the on-line meetings. The RES is a UK-based organisation with a fee for membership. Although it has members from over 50 countries, its membership is dominated by UK-and European-based entomologists, with few members from tropical and Global South countries; the majority is male (76%) and over 45 years old (73%) (based on 2020 membership figures). Without access to a global census of entomologists, we cannot be sure to what extent this represents the wider entomological community and their views, but it is likely that some topics-for example, those related to tropical systems-could have been under-represented because of biases in the initial selection of invited participants. However, our analysis showed that respondents contributing to Stages 1 and 3 were representative of the current RES membership. Although our survey response rates at Stages 1 and 3 were relatively low (11.8% and 9.4%, respectively), this is expected from online surveys and falls comfortably within the range reported from a meta-analysis of published survey response rates by Shih and Fan (2008). was consistently the journal experiencing the most downloads. Ecology, conservation, and landscape-scale ideas came through strongly in the final list of priority topics, and so it should be acknowledged that this was potentially influenced by our recruitment profile.
The process was conducted entirely online owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, rather than including an in-person workshop as had been planned, and as is common in similar exercises (Sutherland et al., 2011). Recent research in experimental psychology demonstrates that although groups using video-conferencing are not able to produce new creative ideas as easily, they are at least as effective as in-person groups when it comes to selecting which ideas to pursue (Brucks & Levav, 2022). Also, online workshops can help to enhance accessibility and increase inclusivity (e.g. similar to the benefits recorded for online conferences; Sarabipour, 2020).
Topics suggested by multiple contributors at Stage 1, which were amalgamated in Stage 2 before voting in Stages 3 and 4, were more likely to be chosen for the final list of priorities than those suggested by fewer people. This suggests that despite lower numbers of participants in later stages of the process, and potential skew in the demographics of these groupings, the choices of later stage participants reflected the ideas that came through strongly across the wider membership at the first stage of the process.