Protected areas in Britain fail to stop loss of insects and spiders

Invertebrate monitoring data from 1990 to 2018 show that protected areas in Britain are losing species at the same rate as unprotected areas

By Gary Hartley

Protected areas in Britain are losing invertebrate species at the same rate as areas with no protection – prompting a call for more effective management of land assigned for conservation.

Rob Cooke at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and his colleagues looked at data from invertebrate monitoring carried out between 1990 and 2018 to work out how widespread species are within protected and unprotected zones. The study included 1238 species of ants, bees, hoverflies, ladybirds, spiders and …