There is a shortage of experts to study insect diversity in Spain.

Irene Vega

Given the current crisis in insect diversity, there should be a strong scientific community to document it. However, specialists in many countries have been complaining for decades that their description and inventory work is not valued and, therefore, not funded.

To verify this claim and highlight their work, a team of 20 specialists, led by Fernando Cortés-Fossati and Marcos Méndez from the Department of Biodiversity and Conservation at the Rey Juan Carlos University, has explored whether the necessary scientific framework exists in Spain to study this crisis. To do so, they conducted a historical analysis of the temporal change in this field from 1900 to 2020, using data on the number of scientific societies, journals, articles, and doctoral theses dedicated to insects. “The results of our work support this pessimistic view,” notes Marcos Méndez. “Although there was an increase in the number of societies, journals, and publications, especially beginning in the 70s, the trend reversed in the late 80s,” he adds.

The study suggests that the most likely cause of this decline is the change in scientific policy in the late 80s, which encouraged publication in international journals. “Specialists have had a difficult time retraining due to the local interest in their studies, and consequently, the possibility of recruiting specialists has declined. This jeopardizes the ability to understand and describe insect diversity before they disappear,” emphasizes Fernando Cortés-Fossati.

The results of this study, published in Insect Systematics and Diversity, therefore, support the concern expressed by the entomological community—specialized in the study of insects—about the future of the discipline in the country. The number of specialists in research centers continues to decline, and the task increasingly falls to amateurs, who lack access to resources, funding, and modern techniques. "This deficiency must be corrected with a change in Spanish scientific policy," the researchers point out.

Review of indicators and decline in publications in Spain

In the late 80s, Spain began promoting the internationalization of its scientific output. During that time, many entomological journals published by universities and museums disappeared, and the number of doctoral theses on taxonomy and faunal science declined dramatically: from 40% of all theses defended in 1980 to less than 2% in 2020.

To analyze the causes of this decline, the study led by the URJC has reviewed different indicators of the historical development of entomology in Spain between 1900 and 2020. The data collected refers to the number of entomological journals and societies, the number of members and articles published per year, and the nationality of the authors of those articles. Furthermore, for the period 1980–2020, the number of doctoral theses defended that dealt with taxonomic and faunal entomology was also studied, in relation to other branches of entomology such as ecology, genetics, physiology, or applied entomology.

This paper concludes that the study of Spanish taxonomic entomology, published mainly in national journals, has not been able to reverse the downward trend in recent decades.