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Simone Fattorini¹

¹Azorean Biodiversity Group and Platform for Enhancing Ecological Research and Sustainability, Departamento de Ciências Agrárias, Universidade dos Açores, Angra do Heroísmo, Portugal. simone_fattorini@virgilio.it

|May 1, 2013

Summary

Developing faunistic knowledge for insect inventories requires extensive time, space, and collectors. Amateur naturalists (parafaunists) proved more efficient than professionals in building reliable species inventories.

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Area of Science:

Biodiversity research
Entomology
Faunistics

Background:

Understanding the development of faunistic knowledge is crucial for assessing insect inventory completeness and planning regional research.
This study addresses the unexplored issue of how regional species inventories are established over time.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the processes leading to a complete regional species inventory for a beetle family.
To analyze the factors influencing the accumulation of faunistic knowledge.

Main Methods:

A case study of tenebionid beetles in the Latium region (Italy) was conducted.
A faunistic database was created from 25,349 museum specimens and published data (1871-2010).
Accumulation curves and non-parametric estimators modeled the increase in faunistic knowledge over time, space, and by collector number.

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Main Results:

A reliable species inventory required significant time, large spatial extent, and numerous collectors.
Massive sampling efforts were ineffective for discovering more species.
Amateur naturalists (parafaunists) were more efficient collectors than professional entomologists.
Museum collections by parafaunists provided cost-effective faunistic data.

Conclusions:

The development of comprehensive faunistic knowledge is a long-term process influenced by collector effort and spatial coverage.
Parafaunists play a vital role in building faunistic knowledge and their contributions should be valued.
Standardized ecological collections have limited utility for improving faunistic knowledge unless conducted in under-surveyed areas.