Drivers and impacts of Insect biodiversity changes across PanTropical forests

  • França, Filipe (Principal Investigator)
  • Phillips, Oliver L (Collaborator)
  • Memmott, Jane (Collaborator)
  • Lewis, Simon (Collaborator)
  • Fauset, Sophie (Collaborator)
  • Jucker, Tommaso (Collaborator)
  • Grueter, Christoph (Collaborator)
  • Manoel Galetti-Junior, Pedro (Collaborator)
  • Vasconcelos, Leonardo (Collaborator)
  • Vaz‐de‐Mello, Fernando Z. (Collaborator)
  • Juen, Leandro (Collaborator)
  • Ashton, Louise A (Collaborator)
  • Schipper, Aafke (Collaborator)
  • Baffoe, Affum (Collaborator)

Project Details

Description

"PanTropIn: Causas e Impactos de Mudanças na biodiversidade de Insetos em florestas PanTropicais" (in Portuguese)

Despite the growing number of academic studies and media headlines drawing attention to 'collapses in insect biodiversity', the status of insect populations continues to attract insufficient research attention. This bias is evidenced by the fact that only c. 1% of all described insects have had their conservation status assessed by the IUCN compared with 72% of vertebrates. PanTropIn work packages (WPs) will WP1) investigate the occurrence, scale and causes of changes in tropical insect biodiversity; WP2) quantify the impacts of agricultural pesticides and heavy metals on insect populations; WP3) determine the cascade effects of insect loss for their interactions with other biological groups; and WP4) promote biodiversity conservation through forecasting how distinct scenarios of climate change and land-use intensification will affect tropical insects to inform the decision-making.

PanTropIn will establish the first pantropical insect monitoring programme with standardized methods in Amazonian, Ghanaian and Malaysian forests. This information will be combined with state-of-the-art ecotoxicology, metabarcoding, remote sensing and ecological modelling techniques to assess disturbance-driven impacts on insect communities and populations, changes in interaction networks with other taxonomic groups, and the contamination by distinct pollutants. This information generated through PanTropIn will be integrated with large-scale spatialized insect abundance data from the study regions to forecast the impacts of further climate and land-use changes on insect biodiversity.

PanTropIn is funded by the UKRI Future Leader Fellowship (May/2024 to April/2028).

Our team: Dr F França (UK-PI), Oliver Phillips (Leeds), Simon Lewis (Leeds/College of London), Sophie Fauset (Plymouth), Jane Memmott, Tommaso Jucker and Christoph Grueter (Bristol), Pedro Galetti Jr (UFSCar), Leonardo Vasconcelos and Fernando Vaz-de-Mello (UFMT), Leandro Juen and Luciano Montag (UFPA), Louise Ashton (Hong Kong), Aafke Schipper (Radboud), Affum Baffoe (Forestry Commission of Ghana).
Alternative titleUKRI Future Leader Fellowship
AcronymPanTropIn
StatusActive
Effective start/end date1/05/2430/04/28

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