Odonata as surrogates of biodiversity

Abstract

Abstract Biodiversity surrogacy has become an essential component of conservation management, especially given the current global biodiversity crisis. Successful surrogates of biodiversity allow for rapid, cost-effective surveys and can signal early warnings of potential threats. Proposed surrogates should be well-known taxonomically and represent the diversity of other taxa that occur in the same ecosystem, much like Odonata, which are renowned for their use as biodiversity surrogates. This chapter discusses the history and terminology of surrogacy, a long-standing controversy, which dates back to the 1960s. We review some of the available literature, discuss methods for surrogate selection, and highlight the characteristics of dragonflies that make them successful biodiversity surrogates. Adults, nymphs, and exuviae of dragonflies can all be used as biodiversity surrogates, and each life stage has several advantages and disadvantages associated with their application. However, conservation measures that combine information from all three life stages have been found the most effective. Subsets of local dragonfly assemblages, in some cases even single rare and threatened species, have represented whole dragonfly assemblages. Using dragonflies as surrogates for other taxa has found mixed success dependent on scale and other factors. Lastly, the issue of standardization is brought to light by investigating confounding factors for using dragonflies as biodiversity surrogates and we recommend future research considerations for the way forward.