- LIFEPLAN tracks arthropods, fungi, mammals and birds simultaneously using identical methods repeated year-round across continents, generating one of the largest standardized biodiversity data sets ever assembled.
- A forthcoming study found that geographic distance is a key driver of endemism in Madagascar’s arthropods.
- Entomologists use LIFEPLAN data to identify new priority areas for insect conservation that are not represented in the current protected area network.
- Researchers say they hope LIFEPLAN methods can support long-term biodiversity monitoring in Madagascar’s protected areas in collaboration with different partners.
Conservation biologist Dimby Raharinjanahary spent years walking through Madagascar’s forests, counting some of the island’s most visible species, such as lemurs and birds. Raharinjanahary was head of monitoring and research for the country’s national parks service from 2012 to 2018, when monitoring still relied largely on tracking a handful of species as indicators of forest condition and ecosystem health.
“Conservation is based on a few target species. If you don’t see them, you say the forest is degraded,” he tells Mongabay. “But the opposite can also be true: you find them, and the forest is still degraded.”
Raharinjanahary, now director of monitoring at the Madagascar Biodiversity Center, is part of a global initiative called LIFEPLAN that is working to improve this. LIFEPLAN expands biodiversity monitoring beyond a few target species to include a much wider range of organisms, including hyper-diverse and still poorly known groups such as arthropods and fungi.
Building a global picture of biodiversity
Across 83 sites worldwide, researchers affiliated with LIFEPLAN simultaneously tracked arthropods, fungi, mammals and birds. Their work built on an earlier effort, the Insect Biome Atlas, which mapped insect biomass in Sweden and Madagascar between 2019 and 2020, before expanding into a broader global program covering multiple groups of organisms. The expanded program is using identical methods, repeated year-round and across continents to compare biodiversity consistently across sites and, in turn, explore how changes in climate or human pressure may shape future ecosystems.
“These sequences represent things that nobody has ever seen before. Most taxa are unknown and that applies to anywhere in the world,” said Tomas Roslin, an ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and one of the leaders of the LIFEPLAN project.
Across the whole project, researchers have to date compiled 177 years’ worth of audio recordings, 21 million images from camera traps, 7,000 soil samples, 19,000 insects caught using Malaise traps, and 29,000 samples from cyclone samplers to assess fungal spores.
In Madagascar, the project took shape across more than 50 locations spanning the country’s full climatic gradient. Much of the work depended on local communities, who maintained a network of sampling tools — including insect traps, camera traps, audio recorders, soil samplers, and cyclone samplers — and regularly uploaded the data, Raharinjanahary said.
Fieldwork came with particular challenges. Inaccessible roads, limited cellphone network coverage, and, in the east of the country, heavy rainfall that sometimes damaged equipment. It was also difficult to recruit and train local staff with the necessary levels of literacy and ease with digital tools, he added.
Different forces shape different forms of life
LIFEPLAN has generated a revealing new picture of Madagascar’s insect diversity, with models suggesting around 255,000 species of arthropods.
In a forthcoming study, researchers led by Brian Fisher, an entomologist at the California Academy of Sciences in the U.S., used the data to test whether the environmental patterns, such as climate or physical barriers, that explain vertebrate diversity also apply to arthropods and fungi across the island.
The answer was unexpectedly clear.
“We did not anticipate how completely decoupled these mechanisms would be,” Fisher told Mongabay. “It means that a conservation strategy optimized for one group, for instance a network of protected areas designed around bird or lemur hotspots, will systematically fail to represent arthropod or fungal diversity.”
For arthropods, geographic distance is the dominant driver of diversity, Fisher said. This pattern means that every remaining patch of forest contains irreplaceable arthropod diversity, and that every area already lost has likely taken unique species with it, he said.
“Communities [of arthropods] change rapidly as you move across the island, regardless of climate, [while] fungi track climate, not geography.”
Priority conservation areas for insects
These findings are already starting to influence conservation planning in Madagascar. At a recent national biodiversity workshop, taxonomists met in discipline-based groups to discuss priority areas for future protection and exploration based on their most recent data.
Ahead of the workshop, entomologists used LIFEPLAN data to build models estimating how many unique insect species are likely to occur in different locations based on geographic distance. These models were then used to identify areas that would capture the greatest share of insect diversity.
“Based on our model for turnover, we know that the further you move from one forest patch to another, the greater the turnover of species,” Fisher said. Up to two-thirds of the species found at one location won’t be found at another site just 80 kilometers (50 miles) away, he said.
Using this approach, the team prioritized forest patches that are farthest from existing protected areas, Fisher told Mongabay. “We have generated a map of the top 50 priority sites for capturing species that are not represented in the current protected area network.”
Building the foundations of long-term biodiversity monitoring
Turning biodiversity monitoring into a sustained system requires both time and resources, but it can be scaled to site-level biomonitoring.
Fisher said a practical biomonitoring program covering 10 sites would cost roughly $75,000 to $150,000 per year, depending on site accessibility, laboratory processing and data analysis. “Over a five-year period, this generates a statistically meaningful baseline and the first detectable trend data.”
The real investment is in people, he added — trained local technicians who maintain equipment, manage sampling over time, and build long-term expertise.
Detecting meaningful changes in arthropod communities would likely require at least 10 to 15 years of standardized sampling at the same sites, Fisher said. “That is precisely why establishing a baseline now — with the rigor and replicability of the LIFEPLAN protocol — is so important.”
Raharinjanahary said the idea is for the LIFEPLAN methods to become a long-term biodiversity monitoring system for Madagascar’s protected areas, in collaboration with Madagascar’s national parks authority, NGOs, and even companies monitoring restoration success.
“The goal is not only to track forest recovery in terms of tree growth, but to assess whether broader biodiversity is actually returning,” he said. “As our methods allow us to monitor biodiversity over time, we can identify reliable indicators of ecosystem change.”
Banner image: The royal blue pansy butterfly (Junonia rhadama), one of the endemic insect species trapped by the IBA. Image by Andrianiaina Angelo via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Reimagining insect research: Interview with Roel van Klink and Leandro Nascimento
Citations:
Hardwick, B., Kerdraon, D., Rogers, H. M., Raharinjanahary, D., Rajoelison, E. T., Mononen, T., … Ovaskainen, O. (2024). LIFEPLAN: A worldwide biodiversity sampling design. PLOS ONE, 19(12), e0313353. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0313353
Ovaskainen, O., Winter, S., Tikhonov, G., Abrego, N., Anslan, S., DeWaard, J. R., … Dunson, D. (2024). Common to rare transfer learning (CORAL) enables inference and prediction for a quarter million rare Malagasy arthropods. Nature Methods, 22(10), 2074-2082. doi:10.1038/s41592-025-02823-y
Miraldo, A., Sundh, J., Iwaszkiewicz-Eggebrecht, E., Buczek, M., Goodsell, R., Johansson, H., … Ronquist, F. (2025). Data of the Insect Biome Atlas: A metabarcoding survey of the terrestrial arthropods of Sweden and Madagascar. Scientific Data, 12(1), 835. doi:10.1038/s41597-025-05151-0
Ovaskainen, O., Abrego, N., Furneaux, B. , Hardwick, B., Somervuo, P., Palorinne, I., … Roslin, T. (2024). Global Spore Sampling Project: A global, standardized dataset of airborne fungal DNA. Scientific Data, 11(1), 561. doi:10.1038/s41597-024-03410-0
Feedback: Use this form to send a message to the author of this post. If you want to post a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the page.
Credits
This story first appeared on Mongabay
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Mongabay, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
