Improving our understanding of insect responses to climate change

Abstract Despite the central importance of insects to ecosystem multifunctionality, this book reveals that our current knowledge about how insects respond to climate change is limited by several key aspects: (i) the lack of long-term data monitoring population dynamics, including declines, shifts, expansions and extinctions; (ii) the low evidence available regarding the effects of climate change in some geographical regions, mainly the tropics, despite their high biodiversity; (iii) a taxonomic bias where a few insect orders have been studied in detail whereas others remain mostly unstudied; (iv) the effect of climate change interacting with other stressors such as habitat loss, pollution and exotic species remains mostly unexplored; and (v) the effects of species losses or gains on ecosystem functioning are constrained by cascading effects, which have been overlooked in insects. This chapter describes these aspects and the importance of considering them in further studies in order to have an integrated view of how insects respond to climate change.