Abstract
BackgroundInsects play a central role in the functioning of terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems and contribute to a multitude of ecosystem services in managed and unmanaged systems Even local declines of insect abundance and richness can have enormous ecological and economic consequences. Evidence-informed conservation actions are essential to prevent potential cascading consequences of insect declines, and to help declining populations recover. Policy-makers rely on syntheses of primary research, such as reviews and meta-analyses, when making decisions about which conservation actions to implement. These evidence reviews vary in their quality, and do not necessarily synthesise the full range of scientific evidence found in the primary literature, which hampers decision-making. This evidence review map will identify, catalogue, and describe evidence reviews that investigate actions and policies to conserve insect biodiversity. This will help policy makers identify relevant reviews and researchers to identify synthesis gaps. It will also generate a list of conservation actions which can feed into future synthesis projects. We will produce an interactive database of evidence reviews, acting as a bibliography for policy-makers, curate a list of insect conservation actions that have been reviewed, and identify synthesis gaps for conservation actions that have not been reviewed.MethodsWe will search for evidence reviews across seven large, generic bibliographic databases, a database of environmental reviews, and five grey literature resources using a search string consisting of an insect substring, a biodiversity or population response substring, an evidence synthesis substring, and a conservation substring. The results will be deduplicated and then screened at title and abstract (concurrently) and full text levels against predefined inclusion criteria. We will initially perform consistency checking on a subset of records at each level to ensure the inclusion criteria are sufficiently clear and understood by multiple reviewers. We will extract a suite of descriptive meta-data from relevant reviews, including a description of the action and information on each review’s focal taxa, biomes, and locations. If resources allow, we will apply the CEESAT critical appraisal tool for evidence reviews to assess validity of individual records and the evidence base as a whole. We will summarise our findings in an interactive database of reviews and other visualisations, including evidence atlases and heat maps (cross tabulations of the volume of evidence across two categorical variables). The findings of the evidence review map will support the identification of synthesis gaps and clusters that may warrant further attention through secondary research.
Highlights
Insects play a central role in the functioning of terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems and contribute to a multitude of ecosystem services in managed and unmanaged systems Even local declines of insect abundance and richness can have enormous ecological and economic consequences
In order to prioritise where syntheses of insect conservation actions are needed for policy recommendations, it is critical to know what syntheses exist, which conservation actions have been reviewed, and which synthesis gaps remain
In the process of creating the database of existing reviews, we aim to identify synthesis gaps and clusters, directing future synthesis effort to where it is most needed
Summary
This synthesis will follow the methodological guidance for ‘evidence review maps’ set out by O’Leary et al [37], and conforms to ROSES reporting standards (see Additional file 1) [51]. Appraisal will begin with an initial consistency checking of application of the CEESAT 2.0 tool by two or more reviewers, with all disagreements discussed and criteria clarified prior to appraisal of the full set of included reviews The results of this assessment would be used in narrative synthesis to summarise the numbers of studies with different ratings across the evidence base. We will highlight topics where syntheses exist of low validity (if critical appraisal is conducted) and where rigorous systematic review may be warranted
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