Regional Insect Inventories Require Long Time, Extensive Spatial Sampling and Good Will

Abstract

Understanding how faunistic knowledge develops is of paramount importance to correctly evaluate completeness of insect inventories and to plan future research at regional scale, yet this is an unexplored issue. Aim of this paper was to investigate the processes that lead to a complete species inventory at a regional level for a beetle family. The tenebionid beetles of Latium region (Italy) were analysed as a case study representative of general situations. A comprehensive faunistic database including 3,561 records spanning from 1871 to 2010 was realized examining 25,349 museum specimens and published data. Accumulation curves and non-parametric estimators of species richness were applied to model increase in faunistic knowledge over time, through space and by collectors’ number. Long time, large spatial extent and contribution of many collectors were needed to obtain a reliable species inventory. Massive sampling was not effective in recovering more species. Amateur naturalists (here called parafaunists) were more efficient collectors than professional entomologists. Museum materials collected by parafaunists over long periods and large spatial extent resulted to be a cost effective source of faunistic information with small number of collected individuals. It is therefore important to valuate and facilitate the work of parafaunists as already suggested for parataxonomists. By contrast, massive collections by standardized techniques for ecological research seem to be of scarce utility in improving faunistic knowledge, but their value for faunistic studies may be enhanced if they are conducted in poorly surveyed areas.

Quantifying regional biodiversity in the tropics: A case study of freshwater fish in Trinidad and Tobago

“…The survey we used in this analysis took place over two years and involved many hours of preparation and fieldwork. Even in relatively well‐sampled sites, a short period of sampling activity does not often come close to the actual number of species in an area (Fattorini, ). This is a particular problem in tropical regions, where there is a substantial need for data.…”

“…Historical natural history museum records and herbarium collections are potential sources of data for biodiversity estimation and are increasingly used to address ecological and conservation questions (Pyke & Ehrlich, ; Reznick, Baxter & Endler, ). There are, though, concerns about possible biases in these types of data, particularly in terms of spatial representation and sampling bias (Fattorini, ; Guralnick & Van Cleve, ; Newbold, ).…”

Estimación de la riqueza de coleópteros epigeos de la Reserva Nacional Pingüino de Humboldt (Regiones de Atacama y Coquimbo, Chile)

“…Sin embargo, a la fecha siguen siendo métodos bastante utilizados y su uso se extiende en diversos grupos de artrópodos, tanto insectos como arácnidos (Fattorini et al 2013b;Zmihorski et al 2013;Jiménez-Valverde et al 2015;Wei et al 2016).…”

Use of insect distribution across landscape-soil units to assess conservation priorities in a Mediterranean coastal reserve: the tenebrionid beetles of Castelporziano (Central Italy)

“…We used Kattan values already available for the tenebrionids of the study area as given in , and Fattorini (2014). Therefore, we resume here only the basic steps used to calculate the Kattan index of each species, because the primary data and a complete description of both the rationale and the adopted protocols can be found in Fattorini (2013).…”