| 1. |
- Jaschhof, Mathias, et al.
(författare)
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New records of Manota Williston (Diptera: Mycetophilidae) in Europe and North America, including a redescription of Manota unifurcata Lundström and pointers towards the interrelationships among Palaearctic species
- 2011
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Ingår i: Studia Dipterologica. - 0945-3954. ; 17:1, s. 55-66
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Knowledge of the morphology of Manota unifurcata LUNDSTRÖM, 1913 is deepened by a detailed description and illustration of the male genitalia. Based on a study of the characters of the male genitalia in specimens from various countries, it is reconfirmed that M. unifurcata is the only species of Manota WILLISTON in Europe. Its geographic distribution is reviewed, and is augmented by new records from Germany and the first records from Sweden. The relationships of M. unifurcata to other Manota species are discussed. It appears that the species is rather isolated from other Manota in terms of both morphology and geographic distribution. The presence of a male hind tibial organ, which is described here, is a synapomorphous character shown by at least 4 of the 5 East Palaearctic species of Manota. These species and several Oriental Manota, for which presence or absence of the tibial organ is unknown, have several male genitalia characters in common, a fact that indicates their close relationships. Manota ibanezi HIPPA & HUERTA, 2009 from Mexico is shown to occur also in the north-eastern United States (Maine and New York). These are the first records of a named Manota species from the Nearctic Region. Possible explanations for the rarity of Manota in both North America and Europe are discussed.
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| 2. |
- Karlsson, Dave, et al.
(författare)
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The Swedish Malaise Trap Project: a 15 year retrospective on a countrywide inventory.
- 2020
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Ingår i: Biodiversity Data Journal. - 1314-2836 .- 1314-2828. ; 8
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The Swedish Malaise Trap Project (SMTP) is one of the most ambitious insect inventories ever attempted. The project was designed to target poorly known insect groups across a diverse range of habitats in Sweden. The field campaign involved the deployment of 73 Malaise traps at 55 localities across the country for three years (2003-2006). Over the past 15 years, the collected material has been hand sorted by trained technicians into over 300 taxonomic fractions suitable for expert attention. The resulting collection is a tremendous asset for entomologists around the world, especially as we now face a desperate need for baseline data to evaluate phenomena like insect decline and climate change. Here, we describe the history, organisation, methodology and logistics of the SMTP, focusing on the rationale for the decisions taken and the lessons learned along the way. The SMTP represents one of the early instances of community science applied to large-scale inventory work, with a heavy reliance on volunteers in both the field and the laboratory. We give estimates of both staff effort and volunteer effort involved. The project has been funded by the Swedish Taxonomy Initiative; in total, the inventory has cost less than 30 million SEK (approximately 3.1 million USD). Based on a subset of the samples, we characterise the size and taxonomic composition of the SMTP material. Several different extrapolation methods suggest that the material comprises around 20 million specimens in total. The material is dominated by Diptera (75% of the specimens) and Hymenoptera (15% of specimens). Amongst the Diptera, the dominant groups are Chironomidae (37% of specimens), Sciaridae (15%), Phoridae (13%), Cecidomyiidae (9.5%) and Mycetophilidae (9.4%). Within Hymenoptera, the major groups are Ichneumonidae (44% of specimens), Diaprioidea (19%), Braconidae (9.6%), Platygastroidea (8.5%) and Chalcidoidea (7.9%). The taxonomic composition varies with latitude and season. Several Diptera and Hymenoptera groups are more common in non-summer samples (collected from September to April) and in the North, while others show the opposite pattern. About 1% of the total material has been processed and identified by experts so far. This material represents over 4,000 species. One third of these had not been recorded from Sweden before and almost 700 of them are new to science. These results reveal the large amounts of taxonomic work still needed on Palaearctic insect faunas. Based on the SMTP experiences, we discuss aspects of planning and conducting future large-scale insect inventory projects using mainly traditional approaches in relation to more recent approaches that rely on molecular techniques.
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| 3. |
- Ronquist, Fredrik, et al.
(författare)
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Completing Linnaeus’s inventory of the Swedish insect fauna: only 5,000 species left?
- 2020
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Ingår i: PLOS ONE. - : Public Library of Science (PLoS). - 1932-6203. ; 15:3
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- 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.
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