Expanding / This butterfly is also called the Cairns Birdwing. (Credit: Jody Jacobson)
Nearly 17% of the world’s land area, or 22.5 million square kilometers, is now in protected areas. Countries have enacted laws to protect these land parcels (and sometimes bodies of water), ensuring that the natural ecosystems and their respective species and functions remain in good condition. Clearly, creating protected areas has allowed some species, such as the Asian elephant, to survive.
But protected areas around the world, at least as of 2019, fail to account for insects, the world’s smallest, most vulnerable and most inherently nasty creatures. A new study sheds light on this issue, suggesting that more than three-quarters of his known insect species are not adequately protected in current dedicated reserves.
According to Shawan Chowdhury, a conservation biologist at the German Center for Integrated Biodiversity Research and one of the paper’s authors, there may be many more spooky crawl species that we don’t know about, and existing protected areas may have failed due to .
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