Talk:Insect biodiversity

Reorganize and expand

This is a rather weak article on insect diversity. Because agriculture, human consumption, and human culture are only tangentially related to insect biodiversity, I have shifted these sections to the end of the article. This places the (sparse) paragraph on numbers and the more expansive one on conservation ahead. Hopefully someone can expand the section on numbers of species.

While I am leaving it alone beyond moving it, the section on Agriculture is not very convincing as to how it relates to the topic of biodiversity, is rather a stretch. Perhaps some of it was written with the hope of being introductory, as it was the first main paragraph.

GeeBee60 (talk) 15:22, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

After further consideration I tagged the section on Agriculture with "undue weight". Perhaps a different tag was more appropriate. But at any rate, the entire section is kind of misplaced and overstated and lacking in sound source material and corroborating evidence. Insect biodiversity and pollination services? Insect biodiversity and local hydrology?

The next section, on Food, is only slightly closer to being on point. People eating insects is interesting, but 1,000 species eaten out of 1 million insect species (i.e. only 1% of insects) is hardly an argument about diversity.

I can accept an argument that the final section, on Human Culture, includes the awe in which some people notice and explore the diversity of insects, which fits into the section on human culture.

GeeBee60 (talk) 03:21, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

Species trends proportion graph

Insects with population trends documented by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, for orders Collembola, Hymenoptera, Lepidoptera, Odonata, and Orthoptera.

@Kingofaces43: regarding this revert, why does showing the relative proportions of the species with IUCN-documented trends not serve the reader better than omitting them? EllenCT (talk) 06:49, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

As discussed previously, the total number of insect species listed with the IUCN is only 203 species. That's nowhere near the 1 million+ insects out there, and sources already discuss how IUCN is going to focus more on species that are of concern rather than true random sampling, or that certain orders are not as well represented as others in current measurements. If we had sources discussing accurate estimates of population trends in specific orders with respect to total number of insect species (where proportions would become appropriate), then such a graph would be appropriate for an encyclopedic audience. This current approach of discussing subsets of an already small subset isn't anywhere near that though, and is the kind of graph usage frequently cautioned against in introductory science courses when they can be easily taken out of context.

WP:NOTJOURNAL applies in terms of audience though. One can discuss that in an extremely small subset that the IUCN has trend data, but much more data is needed. Even saying that there is an overall 33% decline in those 203 species is already getting into nuts a bolts territory for very careful discussion among scientists, but extremely tricky for use in an encyclopedia. Trying to split that up into orders just introduces more problems where readers would be prone to make mistakes thinking that say 100% of all Orthoptera is in decline or somethone thinking that Collembola is supposed to be included in the graph. The current 33% figure is about as far as we can get in terms of WP:DUE while presenting very technical information that readers can easily accidentally gloss over at a page that's not meant for discussing the nuts and bolts of the IUCN and lack of data. Kingofaces43 (talk) 00:03, 1 May 2019 (UTC)