Completing Linnaeus's inventory of the Swedish insect fauna: Only 5,000 species left?

Despite more than 250 years of taxonomic research, we still have only a vague idea about the true size and composition of the faunas and floras of the planet. Many biodiversity inventories provide limited insight because they focus on a small taxonomic subsample or a tiny geographic area. Here, we report on the size and composition of the Swedish insect fauna, thought to represent roughly half of the diversity of multicellular life in one of the largest European countries. Our results are based on more than a decade of data from the Swedish Taxonomy Initiative and its massive inventory of the country's insect fauna, the Swedish Malaise Trap Project The fauna is considered one of the best known in the world, but the initiative has nevertheless revealed a surprising amount of hidden diversity: more than 3,000 new species (301 new to science) have been documented so far. Here, we use three independent methods to analyze the true size and composition of the fauna at the family or subfamily level: (1) assessments by experts who have been working on the most poorly known groups in the fauna; (2) estimates based on the proportion of new species discovered in the Malaise trap inventory; and (3) extrapolations based on species abundance and incidence data from the inventory. For the last method, we develop a new estimator, the combined non-parametric estimator, which we show is less sensitive to poor coverage of the species pool than other popular estimators. The three methods converge on similar estimates of the size and composition of the fauna, suggesting that it comprises around 33,000 species. Of those, 8,600 (26%) were unknown at the start of the inventory and 5,000 (15%) still await discovery. We analyze the taxonomic and ecological composition of the estimated fauna, and show that most of the new species belong to Hymenoptera and Diptera groups that are decomposers or parasitoids. Thus, current knowledge of the Swedish insect fauna is strongly biased taxonomically and ecologically, and we show that similar but even stronger biases have distorted our understanding of the fauna in the past. We analyze latitudinal gradients in the size and composition of known European insect faunas and show that several of the patterns contradict the Swedish data, presumably due to similar knowledge biases. Addressing these biases is critical in understanding insect biomes and the ecosystem services they provide. Our results emphasize the need to broaden the taxonomic scope of current insect monitoring efforts, a task that is all the more urgent as recent studies indicate a possible worldwide decline in insect faunas

Fauna Europaea: Diptera -Brachycera

Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Pape, T., Beuk, P., Pont, A. C., Shatalkin, A. I., Ozerov, A. L., Woźnica, A. J., ... de Jong, Y. (2015). Fauna Europaea: 3, [e4187]. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.3.e4187 General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. Abstract Fauna Europaea provides a public web-service with an index of scientific names (including important synonyms) of all extant multicellular European terrestrial and freshwater animals and their geographical distribution at the level of countries and major islands (east of the Urals and excluding the Caucasus region). The Fauna Europaea project comprises about 230,000 taxonomic names, including 130,000 accepted species and 14,000 accepted subspecies, which is much more than the originally projected number of 100,000 species. Fauna Europaea represents a huge effort by more than 400 contributing taxonomic specialists throughout Europe and is a unique (standard) reference suitable for many user communities in science, government, industry, nature conservation and education. The Diptera-Brachycera is one of the 58 Fauna Europaea major taxonomic groups, and data have been compiled by a network of 55 specialists. Within the two-winged insects (Diptera), the Brachycera constitute a monophyletic group, which is generally given rank of suborder. The Brachycera may be classified into the probably paraphyletic 'lower brachyceran grade' and the monophyletic Eremoneura. The latter contains the Empidoidea, the Apystomyioidea with a single Nearctic species, and the Cyclorrhapha, which in turn is divided into the paraphyletic 'aschizan grade' and the monophyletic Schizophora. The latter is traditionally divided into the paraphyletic 'acalyptrate grade' and the monophyletic Calyptratae. Our knowledge of the European fauna of Diptera-Brachycera varies tremendously among families, from the reasonably well known hoverflies (Syrphidae) to the extremely poorly known scuttle flies (Phoridae). There has been a steady growth in our knowledge of European Diptera for the last two centuries, with no apparent slow down, but there is a shift towards a larger fraction of the new species being found among the families of the nematoceran grade (lower Diptera), which due to a larger number of small-sized species may be considered as taxonomically more challenging. Most of Europe is highly industrialised and has a high human population density, and the more fertile habitats are extensively cultivated. This has undoubtedly increased the extinction risk for numerous species of brachyceran flies, yet with the recent re-discovery of Thyreophora cynophila (Panzer), there are no known cases of extinction at a European level. However, few national Red Lists have extensive information on Diptera. For the Diptera-Brachycera, data from 96 families containing 11,751 species are included in this paper

A Phylogenetic Assessment of Thereva Latreille (Insecta: Diptera: Therevidae)

466 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2003.The objective of this study is to develop a framework for biological research on Thereva (1) using molecular data to test a phylogenetic hypothesis that posits a monophyletic Thereva with respect to a diverse sample of genera in Therevinae, (2) using molecular and morphological data to propose a species-level phylogeny for Thereva to identify biogeographical patterns, and (3) using specimens and specimen label data to complete a taxonomic revision of Thereva for the Nearctic Region. The first phase of phylogenetic analyses addressed previous assertions that Thereva that is a polyphyletic assemblage (composed of several unrelated evolutionary therevine lineages), and involved study of 59 species representing 33 genera in the subfamily Therevinae. Using a molecular dataset of two nuclear genes (28S rDNA and elongation factor 1-alpha) and one mitochondrial gene (16S rDNA), a monophyletic circumscription of Thereva was identified that includes Afrotropical, Nearctic, and Palaearctic species and excludes Afrotropical and Neotropical species treated as Thereva by previous authors. The second phase of phylogenetic analyses examined species relationships within the monophyletic nominal clade of Thereva using two mitochondrial genes (16S and cytochrome oxidase I) and 33 morphological characters; these analyses included six outgroups and 37 Thereva ingroup species. The position of two major clades of Nearctic species and the position of a Far East Palaearctic species provided evidence for at least three Nearctic evolutionary radiations of Thereva that are derived with respect to Palaearctic species. The phylogenetic relationships from combined analyses support a biogeographic connection between the Nearctic and the eastern Palaearctic, and ten species groups of Thereva were identified. A revision of the Nearctic Thereva was developed to provide taxonomic information for recognizing and distinguishing among species. Eleven of the 35 Nearctic species were previously undescribed; one species, Thereva nobilitata (Fabricius), is introduced from the western Palaearctic Region. Characters of the male genitalia and the female frons are of primary importance in distinguishing species of Thereva and are illustrated for all species in the Nearctic Region. The nomenclature for species is updated, and lists of specimens examined and distribution maps are provided.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

Identities of Tenebrio Linnaeus types at Uppsala, and the resulting changes in old darkling beetle names (Insecta: Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae)

Ferrer, Julio, Holston, Kevin (2009): Identities of Tenebrio Linnaeus types at Uppsala, and the resulting changes in old darkling beetle names (Insecta: Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae). Zootaxa 2308 (1): 29-42, DOI: 10.11646/zootaxa.2308.1.2, URL: https://biotaxa.org/Zootaxa/article/view/zootaxa.2308.1.

The data of the Swedish Malaise Trap Project, a countrywide inventory of Sweden's insect fauna

Despite Sweden's strong entomological tradition, large portions of its insect fauna remain poorly known. As part of the Swedish Taxonomy Initiative, launched in 2002 to document all multi-cellular species occurring in the country, the first taxonomically-broad inventory of the country's insect fauna was initiated, the Swedish Malaise Trap Project (SMTP). In total, 73 Malaise traps were deployed at 55 localities representing a wide range of habitats across the country. Most traps were run continuously from 2003 to 2006 or for a substantial part of that time period. The total catch is estimated to contain 20 million insects, distributed over 1,919 samples (Karlsson et al. 2020). The samples have been sorted into more than 300 taxonomic units, which are made available for expert identification. Thus far, more than 100 taxonomists have been involved in identifying the sorted material, recording the presence of 4,000 species. One third of these had not been recorded from Sweden before and 700 have tentatively been identified as new to science.Here, we describe the SMTP dataset, published through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Data on the sorted material are available in the "SMTP Collection Inventory" dataset. It currently includes more than 130,000 records of taxonomically-sorted samples. Data on the identified material are published using the Darwin Core standard for sample-based data. That information is divided up into group-specific datasets, as the sample set processed for each group is different and in most cases non-overlapping. The current data are divided into 79 taxonomic datasets, largely corresponding to taxonomic sorting fractions. The orders Diptera and Hymenoptera together comprise about 90% of the specimens in the material and these orders are mainly sorted to family or subfamily. The remaining insect taxa are mostly sorted to the order level. In total, the 79 datasets currently available comprise around 165,000 specimens, that is, about 1% of the total catch. However, the data are now accumulating rapidly and will be published continuously. The SMTP dataset is unique in that it contains a large proportion of data on previously poorly-known taxa in the Diptera and Hymenoptera

Thereva Latreille, 1797 And Phasia Latreille, 1804 (Insecta, Diptera): Proposed Conservation Of Usage By Designation Of Musca Plebeja Linnaeus, 1758 As The Type Species Of Thereva

Volume: 60Start Page: 198End Page: 20