Insect Key Biodiversity Areas scoping informs targeted monitoring to strengthen spatial stability over time

Insects are essential to sustaining ecosystem health across all biomes, identifying Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) for such hyperdiverse groups is critical to the relevance of the KBA network. To ensure the KBA network supports effective conservation decision-making, established KBAs need to be reassessed every 8 to 12 years. Realistically, reassessments of established KBAs for insects will be based also on opportunistic occurrence points and thus will greatly benefit from scoping analysis - first step of the KBA identification process - through time. However, how changes in species distribution data availability in different time periods may influence the spatial stability of potential KBAs over time has not been investigated in any taxa yet. We performed KBA scoping for 28 species and subspecies of bumblebees in Italy using an expert-validated dataset of distribution data collected between 1990 and 2023, through 10-year cumulative and progressive time series. Our findings indicate that the inherently uneven and sporadic nature of insect occurrence data across species' distribution ranges may contribute to spatial shifts in potential KBAs over time. Potential KBA turnover percentages between different time periods can be high (≃133%). Seven species/subspecies triggered potential KBAs and their turnover percentage ranged between 28.5% and 50%. We propose a method to optimize monitoring strategies informed by KBA scoping under resource constraints, thus reducing potential spatial shifts over time.