IUCN SSC Dung Beetle Specialist Group
Overview and description
Description:
Group leadership
Dr Camila LEANDRO RIVEL
More about the Specialist Group
Dung beetles display a wide range of feeding and breeding strategies that allow them to exploit an ephemeral and patchy resource such as animal droppings. Due to such use of fecal resources and, also, their wide global range, dung beetles have great economic and ecological importance. Indeed, through shredding, burial and dispersal of dung, they play essential functional roles in (1) assisting the recycling of nutrients held in animal wastes, (2) controlling ...
Specialist Group work
Our key activities would be to use the organizational structure to address the key conservation issues, first by highlighting the importance of dung beetles to wide audiences and agricultural professionals, assessing species risk to extinction and collaborating together on how to enhance landscape management in partnership to sustain diversity and ecosystem functionality. For the short-mid term goals, we focus on four “main chapters”:
Raising public awareness about dung beetle ecological importance :
First, we would like to develop social media content to raise awareness on dung beetle diversity, importance and research on the field. We are aiming for Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Filling the communication gap between scientists and farmers
Here we will first need to provide information for farmers in order to raise their awareness of the key role of dung beetles in agricultural ecosystems an to popularize the message of dung beetle conservation (their usefulness, the main threats to them posed by current agricultural practices, the main practical things to do to create a dung beetle friendly farm, etc.). To do this, we can learn from the “Dung beetles for farmers” initiative and similar actions led more locally in France (PlaceNett project), Australia (Dung beetle project) and South Africa.
Networking
We must improve communication and knowledge sharing between dung beetle specialists, inside or outside academia. Not only we will create a shared space for collaboration and discussion internally (tool to be chosen), but we would like to have regular workshops in which, for specific topics (i.e. “education programs”, “farmer-academia interactions”, “lobbying and law change”, “forest conservation”...) colleagues that would have tried to tackle those issues/challenges, whatever the scale, can share their experiences to others and discuss on how to better take decisions in projects aiming for those topics.
Moreover, we would like to update or re-create a dung beetle expert directory (based on the example of the Scarab Network) in which fields and regions of expertise and contact information can be available to anybody willing to reach a dung beetle expert or enthousiast.
Redlisting
In the short term, we would like to assess groups recently taxonomically revised with enough data distribution or endemics (easier to assess at the global level); some candidates are South-African species, South-American species, and maybe, with a compilation effort and a team in charge of create a solid network, European species.
We would like to find funding in order to Revise Museum Collections with Dung beetle curators. This funding could help organize workshops to revise specimens and gather distribution data and also a coordinator of this (specific contract). In the long run we hope to assess and compile recent taxonomic revisions (genus, species, tribes, etc).
DBSG Annual Report
Learn about DBSG’s work and results in 2023.
Previous reports:
2022 DBSG Annual Report