| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
I have made progress on a number of aspects directly related to my project and several aspects indirectly related.
I have published 11 journal articles and one report for the IUCN. A journal article about urban ecosystem services published in Ecosphere as lead author. Publication of an additional two lead-authored articles and eight co-authored articles. Some field work has been completed in October 2020. I have completed about 70% of the invertebrate identification from the first field study. This includes compiling a reference library of several invertebrate species. This study will provide data for a journal article about the main invertebrate species that provide refuse removal ecosystem services in Tokyo. I am planning to conduct two more field studies in May and June. These data should lead to at least two more journal articles about the effects of light on waste removal and carrion decomposition ecosystem services conducted by insects in a major urban centre (Tokyo). A questionnaire under way that will lead to at least one high-impact journal article. I continue to collaborate with researchers in Japan, Australia, UK, USA and New Zealand. I have been invited by the Editor of the journal Ecological Research to lead a journal article that conducts machine learning techniques to analyse text from every journal article from the three major Japanese journals. This will outline the main themes of research from 1986 until now in these journals, including information on where the studies were undertaken, and which taxa were studied.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
I am conducting two field studies that will test two different aspects of ecosystem services provided by insects in urban environments.
Firstly, I will test which insect species remove protein or carbohydrate food waste in urban environments. I will also test whether light affects the rate at which food is removed by insects. Secondly, I will conduct another survey with a similar design, but instead monitoring the insect species that help to decompose carrion. Both of these experiments will yield one or possibly two journal articles on insect ecosystem services.
I am in the middle of conducting a large-scale online questionnaire about people’s attitudes to invertebrate species in Japan. Participants are asked to provide details about themselves (age, gender, occupation, education, appreciation of nature) then asked to answer questions about a series of pictures of invertebrates. These questions are designed to measure their biophobia towards different types of invertebrates and how they perceive that these insects provide ecosystem services. There are 100 pictures of invertebrates to test (only 4 per person), that range in taxon (e.g. wasps, beetles, flies, ants, bees, spiders, centipedes), colour (dull, metallic, yellow, red, black), pattern (striped, spotted, plain), size, shape (long, thin), relative leg size (long, short), cultural significance, venomous, non-venomous, endemic, common, and rare. The hope is to get a dataset of between 10,000 to 40,000 answers about the set of 100 species. The results will likely be published in a high-ranked international journal.
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