The two most urgent and interlinked environmental challenges humanity faces are climate change and biodiversity loss. We are entering a pivotal decade for both the international biodiversity and climate change agendas with the sharpening of | 2847 SHIN et al.

Background The world’s fast disappearing mangrove forests have low plant diversity and are often assumed to also have a species-poor insect fauna. We here compare the tropical arthropod fauna across a freshwater swamp and six different forest types (rain-, swamp, dry-coastal, urban, freshwater swamp, mangroves) based on 140,000 barcoded specimens belonging to ca. 8500 species. Results We find that the globally imperiled habitat “mangroves” is an overlooked hotspot for insect diversity. Our study reveals a species-rich mangrove insect fauna (>3000 species in Singapore alone) that is distinct (>50% of species are mangrove-specific) and has high species turnover across Southeast and East Asia. For most habitats, plant diversity is a good predictor of insect diversity, but mangroves are an exception and compensate for a comparatively low number of phytophagous and fungivorous insect species by supporting an unusually rich community of predators whose larvae feed in the productive mudflats. For the remaining tropical habitats, the insect communities have diversity patterns that are largely congruent across guilds. Conclusions The discovery of such a sizeable and distinct insect fauna in a globally threatened habitat underlines how little is known about global insect biodiversity. We here show how such knowledge gaps can be closed quickly with new cost-effective NGS barcoding techniques.

Capturing the status and trends of biodiversity and ecosystem services in urban landscapes represents an important part of understanding whether a metropolitan area is developing along a sustainable trajectory or not. However, this task also represents unique challenges for policy makers and scientists alike, challenges that lie at both the methodological (scaling, boundaries, defi nitions) and institutional levels (integrating biodiversity and ecosystems with social and economic goals). In this chapter we report on the experiences from municipalities in several countries where the newly developed City Biodiversity Index (CBI) has been applied and tested. The purpose here is not to compare or rank different municipalities but rather to deepen our understanding of the science underlying the

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