Conservation efforts in tropical regions often fail to account for insects, a major weakness identified by scientists at Monash University. The research, led by Dr. Shawan Chowdhury and published in BioScience, proposes a new global strategy to address this imbalance.
Insects are the most diverse group of animals on the planet, with scientists estimating there may be between 14 and 30 million species. Most of these species have not yet been formally documented, and they play a massive role in ecological systems.
These invertebrates pollinate more than 80 percent of wild plant species, serve as food for 60 percent of bird species, and support global food production through nutrient cycling and food webs.
Despite growing evidence that insect populations are declining, much of the scientific knowledge used for conservation comes from temperate regions. Those regions account for only about 20 percent of the world’s insect diversity, creating a significant blind spot in conservation planning.
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“More than 80 percent of insect species occur in the tropics, yet these are the very places where we have some of the biggest gaps in our knowledge,” Dr. Chowdhury said. “We cannot effectively conserve species if we don’t know what is there, where populations are changing, or even where important existing knowledge can be found.”
Data Gaps and Traditional Sources
The research team identified four major problems limiting tropical insect conservation: poor global visibility of existing research, severe data gaps, inadequate scientific infrastructure, and too little conservation action.
The imbalance in existing records is dramatic. Nearly 26 percent of insect distribution data in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility comes from the United Kingdom alone, even though the majority of the world’s insect diversity occurs in tropical regions.
To address these weaknesses, the framework recommends drawing on a much broader range of information. That includes conventional scientific studies as well as regional and non-English publications, museum collections, local knowledge, citizen science, observations shared on social media, and emerging technologies.
Some of the information scientists desperately need already exists but may be in a local journal, held by a regional expert, sitting in a collection, or even contained in photographs shared online. The answer isn’t simply to collect more data; it is to become much better at finding, connecting, and using the knowledge that already exists while building the local expertise and infrastructure needed for long-term monitoring.
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Testing the Model in Bangladesh
The researchers used Bangladesh to demonstrate how their framework could work in practice. Bangladesh is one of the world’s most densely populated tropical countries, making it a useful example of both the difficulties facing insect conservation and the opportunities for improving it.
The team found 111 relevant studies involving butterflies in Bangladesh. Only 34 had been published in international journals. Nearly two-thirds of the studies focused on where different butterfly species were found, while just three dealt specifically with conservation.
Social media emerged as an unexpectedly rich source of biodiversity information. Earlier research found that Facebook contained records for 167 of 169 threatened butterfly species in Bangladesh.
This finding suggests that unconventional sources can help fill major information gaps, especially in countries where formal biodiversity databases are still limited. Bangladesh also illustrates how urgently better information needs to be converted into conservation action. Of 226 butterfly species evaluated in previous research, only one was adequately represented within the country’s existing system of protected areas.
“Bangladesh shows that a lack of conventional data does not mean we have to accept a lack of conservation action,” Dr. Chowdhury said. “By bringing together local knowledge, citizen science, social media, scientific monitoring and regional expertise, we can build a much clearer picture of where species occur and where conservation effort is most urgently needed.”
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Shifting From Parachute Science
The researchers also argue that international conservation research needs to move away from “parachute science,” a model in which scientists and communities in tropical countries are treated mainly as sources of data rather than equal partners.
Instead, the proposed framework emphasizes research led locally, greater investment in regional collections and scientific infrastructure, stronger taxonomic expertise, long-term monitoring, fairer international partnerships, and closer connections between scientists and decision-makers.
If global biodiversity targets are to mean something, tropical insects cannot remain an afterthought. This is about moving from documenting the problem to creating a system that can deliver measurable conservation outcomes—with local scientists and communities at the center of that work.
The tropics hold most of the world’s insect diversity. Protecting that extraordinary diversity is not just an insect conservation issue—it is fundamental to ecosystems, food security and human well-being.
