Awareness and Priorities for the Future

Abstract

The impacts of urbanisation have catalysed awareness of conservation need, with public concerns and interest stimulated in many industrialised countries through the severity, extent and rates of changes to natural environments, including almost all terrestrial and freshwater biotopes occupied by insects. Many of those changes are not restricted to urban environments, although the scales on which they occur may by far exceed those usual elsewhere, so that lack of awareness or interest inevitably leads to species or biotope loss, perhaps with far-reaching cascade effects as scale increases. ‘Crisis-management’ is a recurring theme in urban conservation, but one in which insects have generally played less conspicuous roles than groups such as birds, for which a greater groundswell of public sympathy is common. Pioneering texts (notably those by Fry and Lonsdale 1991; Kirby 2001) emphasise the general nature and consequences of habitat changes for insects, and the principles of management for insect conservation. Indeed, the introduction to the first of these includes specific comment on ‘tidiness’ as a harmful trend in urban habitats – they noted that changes to ponds and marshy ground in Richmond Park, London, had led to loss of almost half the resident dragonfly species over the middle decades of the twentieth century. All measures to conserve insect habitats, whether by preservation or sympathetic restoration, are relevant in urban contexts, so that the substantial practical advice and principles included in the above accounts merit attention well beyond Britain, for which they were primarily devised. The major conservation needs for insects in towns and cities are now reasonably clear, and the principles can be endorsed by evidence from insect responses to numerous different disturbances associated with urbanisation – ranging from short term ‘pulse’ impacts to more enduring and severe changes.