©The Royal Entomological Society 2007. Insect Conservation Biology 34 (eds A.J.A. Stewart, T.R. New and O.T. Lewis) 1 Introduction In comparison with most temperate ecosystems, tropical forests are charac- terized by extraordinarily high but poorly inventoried insect diversity (per- haps 5–10 million species, with less than 1 million of them described), and by an absence of basic biological and ecological information for all but a handful of non-pest species (Godfray et al., 1999; Novotny et al., 2002). Rates of tropi- cal forest habitat degradation and destruction are higher than in almost any other biome (Sala et al., 2000; Pimm, 2001). In combination, these facts signal that the potential loss of insect diversity in tropical forests through human actions in the coming decades is enormous. In fact we are in danger of losing the vast majority of species before we have even documented them (Lawton and May, 1995). Given the practical difficulties of gathering detailed ecological data in tropical environments where the species of interest may often occur at low levels of abundance (Folgarait et al., 1995; Basset, 1999), and where the nature of the habitat often makes sampling or observation difficult, it is perhaps inevi- table that efforts to conserve insects in temperate and tropical regions have typically involved rather different approaches. In temperate countries, at least in the northern hemisphere, conservationists have often focused on gather- ing detailed autecological information on threatened species, including their precise habitat requirements, local and global distributions, interactions with other species and dispersal ability (Stewart and New, Chapter 1, this vol- ume). On the basis of such information, priority areas for the conservation of individual species have been designated, and management or recovery plans have been drawn up and implemented, often with great success (e.g. Collins and Thomas, 1991; Samways, 1994; New et al., 1995). In contrast, there has been no consistent conservation approach for tropical insects. For a minority of rare, threatened or exploited tropical taxa we do have detailed ecological 2 Insect Conservation in Tropical Forests OWEN T. LEWIS 1 AND YVES BASSET 2 1 Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PS, UK; 2 Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Apartado 0843-03092, Balboa, Ancon, Panama City, Republic of Panama Stewart_Ch02.indd 34 Stewart_Ch02.indd 34 2/12/2007 5:52:54 PM 2/12/2007 5:52:54 PM