The DOI matches its Crossref record; 48 of the 48 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
How Many Species of Insects and Other Terrestrial Arthropods Are There on Earth?
Open accessAbstract
In the last decade, new methods of estimating global species richness have been developed and existing ones improved through the use of more appropriate statistical tools and new data. Taking the mean of most of these new estimates indicates that globally there are approximately 1.5 million, 5.5 million, and 7 million species of beetles, insects, and terrestrial arthropods, respectively. Previous estimates of 30 million species or more based on the host specificity of insects to plants now seem extremely unlikely. With 1 million insect species named, this suggests that 80% remain to be discovered and that a greater focus should be placed on less-studied taxa such as many families of Coleoptera, Diptera, and Hymenoptera and on poorly sampled parts of the world. DNA tools have revealed many new species in taxonomically intractable groups, but unbiased studies of previously well-researched insect faunas indicate that 1–2% of species may be truly cryptic.
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Cites
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“The largest proportion of biodiversity comprises undescribed species (Scheffers et al ., 2012), and this problem is especially acute for invertebrates, with the proportion of undescribed insect species perhaps as high as 80% (Stork, 2018).”
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Metadata
- Authors
- Stork, N. E.
- Venue
- Annual Review of Entomology
- Publisher
- Annual Reviews
- Published
- 2018-01-07
- Volume
- 63
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 31-45
- ISSN
- 0066-4170 (ISSN-L)
- 1545-4487
- OpenAlex
- W2759820149
- Cited by
- 1,537
- References
- 48
- FWCI
- 6.84
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
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