Due to their crucial functional role as pollinators, destruents, predators, and prey, insects are of central importance for healthy ecosystems and a key to all efforts to maintain biodiversity and preserve essential ecosystem services. Insects represent the major component of animal diversity in land ecosystems and affect nearly all food webs and biocoenoses. Serious losses in the regional and local diversity of insects do not only lead to a decline in insectivorous species of higher trophic levels but also reduce pollination and seed dispersal of plants and therefore seriously affect the vegetation.
Long-term insect monitoring recently demonstrated a dramatic decline of insect populations within nature-protected areas in Germany. Losses of butterfly populations in other countries suggest that the insect decline is a European phenomenon, and the parallel decline of bird populations suggests that the phenomenon affects whole ecosystems.

This project aims at analyzing insect biodiversity in 21 selected German nature reserves, in correlation with important environmental variables, identifying possible causes of its decline, exploring potentials of stakeholder participation for integrated, cross-sectoral decision-making, and providing evidence-based policy recommendations for more effective biodiversity preservation. This is the first research project addressing these questions in Germany.

The legal and environmental policy framework of the proposed research project is the Biodiversity Convention (CBD 1992) and its numerous decisions concretizing research demands. At the national level, our project is based on the biodiversity strategies of the Federal Government (BMUB 2007), as well as on the Federal Nature Conservation Act and the Fauna-Flora Habitat Directive (FFH-RL).