Collaborators (LTER working group): Shannon Pelini, Angela Laws, Emily Rivest, Megan Woltz, Christopher P. Bloch, Israel Del Toro, Chuan-Kai Ho, John Kominoski, T. A. Scott Newbold, Sheena Parsons, A. Joern

    Globally, the role of invertebrates in ecosystem services is underappreciated and often ignored.  A group of LTER scientists discussed and secured funding (See here for proposal) to review the multitude of evidence suggesting that invertebrates are without question integral to our economy, well-being and survival.  In this manuscript (currently under review in Biological Reviews), we argue that to sustain global ecosystem services in our changing climate, scientists, policy makers, managers and other researchers must begin to explicitly consider the important roles that invertebrates play.

    There is an increasing need to understand the importance of invertebrates globally for several reasons: 1) the general public either ignores or views many invertebrate groups negatively; 2) the positive role of invertebrates in providing ecosystem services is still ignored by scientists, and policy assessments, such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and (3) during the current alarmingly high extinction rates, invertebrate extinctions often go undocumented.  These reasons for understanding the role of invertebrates is especially important in light of how sensitive invertebrate populations are to climate change.