Congratulations to the winners of the 2025 Royal Entomological Society Journal Awards.
Insect Conservation and Diversity is a Royal Entomological Society journal that uniquely combines insect diversity and conservation, focusing on invertebrate preservation. Emphasizing wild arthropods and their specific relationships, this journal covers topics like biogeography, climate change impacts, conservation genetics, and global biodiversity.
Insect Conservation and Diversity welcomes submissions on past and present biodiversity distribution, monitoring arthropod populations, identifying harmful influences, and restoring ecosystem services. With a broad scope, we encourage submissions across insect and arthropod conservation, encompassing ecological theory and practical management.
Insect Conservation and Diversity Winner
Eva Katharina Engelhardt: Myrmecophily is not a risk factor for long-term occupancy trends of central European Lycaenidae butterflies 18.1
Engelhardt developed her fascination with large data and macroecology during her master’s program at the University of Frankfurt, Germany. The emergence of advanced computational methods and a fruitful cooperation with state agencies accumulating vast amounts of insect observation data, allowed her to dive into macroecological research of insects during her PhD at the Technical University of Munich, Germany.
Collaborations with field entomologists enabled her to combine large-scale, long-term data analyses with small-scale insights into insect ecology, reinforcing her belief that interdisciplinarity and appreciation for all levels of biodiversity research are important aspects of advancing our knowledge.
The small copper (Lycaena phlaeas) showed the strongest increases among the ant-independent Lycaenids.
Photo credit: Eva Katharina Engelhardt
Now a postdoctoral researcher with the Department of Global Change Ecology at the University of Würzburg, Germany, she aims at sparking students’ interest for both insects and computational methods as well as advancing the useability of the growing amount of insect observation data for reliable, long-term trend analyses.
“This paper is a nice analysis of long-term data that shows how important it is to include ecological interactions, not just occupancy or abundance, when we want to understand population trends and potential declines.” They added that it also showed, “very strong statistical analyses and important insights into the need to better understand ecological interactions. We were again very impressed with the calibre of studies, and it is of course always hard to select only one from such a list of high quality research.”
– Judges’ comments
The common blue (Polyommatus icarus), a facultative myrmecophile Lycaenid butterfly, showed the strongest declines of all investigated species in the study region.
Photo credit: Eva Katharina Engelhardt
Eva Katharina Engelhardt and her co-authors assessed the fate of central European little blue butterflies (Lycaenidae) over 40 years based on their degree of dependency on ants for rearing their larvae. Such specialization is generally considered a vulnerability under global change, but little blues with different levels of ant-dependence did not show significantly different long-term trends.
Surprisingly more obligatory ant-dependent butterfly species increased compared to ant-independent ones. We concluded that ants potentially protect butterfly larvae against environmental impacts, thus buffering the effects of environmental changes. Their findings highlight the importance of understanding species interactions to improve coupled conservation efforts in our rapidly changing world.
