Three quarters of insects are insufficiently covered by protected areas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Insects dominate the biosphere, driving ecosystem processes and functions that sustain humanity, yet insect populations are plummeting worldwide1. Massive conservation efforts will be needed to halt and reverse these declines2,3. Protected areas (PAs) could play a decisive role in safeguarding insect species from extinction4, but progress so far in achieving coverage of insect distributions by PAs remains undocumented. Here we show that 67,384 of 89,151 insect species assessed globally (76%) do not meet minimum target levels of PA coverage. Nearly 1,900 species from 225 families do not overlap with PAs at all. Species with low PA coverage predominantly occur in North America, Eastern Europe, South and Southeast Asia, and Australasia. The Post 2020 Global Biodiversity Framework5 provides a unique opportunity for nations to guide new PA designations that specifically take account of the needs of insects. Efforts to map important biodiversity areas now need to be upscaled to ensure nations capture and safeguard insect diversity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".