ArticleNature ecology & evolution2023
Convergence of dominance and neglect in flying insect diversity.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 44 papers.
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Who cites it
44 citing papers in PubMed.
- Beyond conventional pollinators: advancing diversity assessments of neglected insect taxa.Annals of the Entomological Society of America · 2026Article
- Prospects for Complete DNA Barcode Coverage of the New Zealand Insect Fauna.Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand · 2026Article
- Integrating Megabarcoding and Metabarcoding to Unlock Diversity and Distribution Data Shortfalls in Dark Taxa.Molecular ecology resources · 2026Article
- Urban Filter vs. Natural Refuge: Divergent Diptera Community Assembly Mechanisms-Evidence from Beijing, China.Biology · 2026Article
- Stable nutritional endosymbiosis across cryptic diversity of a leafhopper species complex.BMC genomics · 2026Article
- UITOTO: a software for generating molecular diagnoses for species descriptions.Cladistics : the international journal of the Willi Hennig Society · 2026Article
- Accuracy of occurrence and abundance estimates from insect metabarcoding.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Performance and Limitations of Out-Of-Distribution Detection for Insect DNA Barcoding.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Balancing Barcoding and Genomics: gDNA Quality in Insect Vouchers After HotSHOT DNA Extraction.Molecular ecology resources · 2026Article
- Characterizing a species-rich and understudied tropical insect fauna using DNA barcoding.GigaScience · 2026Article
- Article
- Large-Scale Integrative Taxonomy of the Smallest Insects Reveals Astonishing Temperate Diversity (Hymenoptera: Chalcidoidea: Mymaridae).Molecular ecology · 2025Article
- Unknown Germany - An integrative biodiversity discovery program.npj biodiversity · 2025Review
- Surveying tropical faunal diversity via airborne DNA analyses.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- What lurks in the dark? An innovative framework for studying diverse wild insect microbiota.Microbiome · 2025Article
- Effects of land cover and protected areas on flying insect diversity.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2025Article
- EntoSieve: Automated Size-Sorting of Insect Bulk Samples to Aid Accurate Megabarcoding and Metabarcoding.Molecular ecology resources · 2025Article
- Are Findings of Key Insect Metrics Generalizable Across Different Taxa in Malaise Trap Samples?Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Stratification of insect diversity and daily activity patterns in the West African virgin forest Taï assessed by entomological Lidar.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Species' traits modulate rapid changes in flight time in high-Arctic muscid flies under climate change.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Most of arthropod biodiversity is unknown to science. Consequently, it has been unclear whether insect communities around the world are dominated by the same or different taxa. This question can be answered through standardized sampling of biodiversity followed by estimation of species diversity and community composition with DNA barcodes. Here this approach is applied to flying insects sampled by 39 Malaise traps placed in five biogeographic regions, eight countries and numerous habitats (>225,000 specimens belonging to >25,000 species in 458 families). We find that 20 insect families (10 belonging to Diptera) account for >50% of local species diversity regardless of clade age, continent, climatic region and habitat type. Consistent differences in family-level dominance explain two-thirds of variation in community composition despite massive levels of species turnover, with most species (>97%) in the top 20 families encountered at a single site only. Alarmingly, the same families that dominate insect diversity are 'dark taxa' in that they suffer from extreme taxonomic neglect, with little signs of increasing activities in recent years. Taxonomic neglect tends to increase with diversity and decrease with body size. Identifying and tackling the diversity of 'dark taxa' with scalable techniques emerge as urgent priorities in biodiversity science.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.