Insects play a key role in ecosystem functions like pollination, nutrient cycling, and food webs. A decline in insects could significantly impact human well-being by reducing crop yields and nutritional supplements that depend on pollinators. Analysis found that complete pollinator loss could increase global deaths by 1.4 million annually due to diseases from malnutrition. While insect declines have been reported worldwide, the full extent is unknown since 90% of insect species remain unidentified and undocumented. This project aims to better understand relationships between insect abundance/diversity and ecosystem stability using long-term datasets, and develop methods to assess the economic value of ecosystem services provided by insects globally.

1. Understanding the Impacts of
Insect Decline on Ecological
Function and Human Well-Being

2. Introduction
• Insects decline is a major concern for
human health because essential
micronutrients in our diet come from
insect-pollinator mediated crops
• because phyto pharmaceuticals and
nutritional supplements depend on
pollinators

3. Introduction
• Analysis found that complete removal of
pollinators could increase global deaths
yearly from non-communicable and
malnutrition-related diseases by about 1.4
million and disability- adjusted life-years by
about 27 million an increase of 2.7% for
deaths

4. Introduction
• Insects decline disturbs the key insect
mediated ecosystems functions including
nutrient cycling, soil formation,
decomposition, and water purification,
pollination services and food web support
that all are critical to ecosystem
functioning and human survival.
• including loss of biodiversity higher-up in
the food-web (e.g. insectivorous birds) and
impairment of ecosystem resilience

5. Honey bees
decline
Crops pollination
food webs
Birds
Aquaculture
Pesticides
Neonicotinoids

7. How pesticides infect honey
bees
• Neoniconitid
• Diazinon
• Imidan
• Malathion

8. Aims
• Declines were also found in Netherlands
Guardian columnist George Monbiot coined
the term ‘insect ageddon’ to warn that the
impacts of global insect collapse are more
catastrophic than climate breakdown
• Although this term has been criticised as being
overly alarmist and unsubstantiated by data,
entomologists warn that insects are indeed
disappearing before we even have data

9. Aims
• Of the approximately 5.5 million insect
species, about 90% has not even been named,
nor have their roles in ecosystems been
mapped. No global scientific monitoring of
insect abundance in the past and present exists
and there are no plans for systematic global
monitoring in the near future

10. Project Summary
• Insects constitute more than half of global
biodiversity and play a central role in the
functioning of terrestrial ecosystems. Declines
of insect abundance, biomass, and range are
being reported from many places around the
world, from the Arctic to the tropics, across
insect orders, and from a spectrum of
ecological guilds but they are not universal,
with certain taxonomic groups, guilds or
communities clearly not declining

11. • An important aspect of recent studies is the
decline of formerly common species, not just
rare taxa, with the realization that such losses
likely come with changes to ecosystem
function, stability and resilience

12. • This project will work with existing long-term
insect assemblage and time series datasets to
develop and explore hypotheses about
relationships between insect (or arthropod)
abundance, diversity, and the stability of
ecological functions It will also develop
methods to value ecosystem services provided
by insects, at large or even global scales