The clearcut residuals weren’t selected for being “old-growth” and unsurprisingly, the clearcut skips didn’t have the fauna of the wildfire skips. These results do however suggest that clearcut skips could be made more effective for conservation by targeting

old-growth (not merely mature) forest. Insects have been proposed as indicators of many things (as reviewed in McGeoch 2007), but Epacadostat a particularly useful property of species groups with adequate knowledge of their ecology would be indication of these outlier paleo-environments not otherwise as easily discerned by plant composition and structure alone. A corollary to Haldane’s possibly apocryphal quip about the creator’s “inordinate fondness for beetles” (as repeated in Ashworth 2001) is an inordinate fondness for specialists (and thus the stability most likely to favor persistence of such faunas), at least given proclivities for landscape dynamism both in the non-conserved modern landscape and in ecological conservation management. More continuous and unintensive managements (e.g., light grazing) and consistent managements, even if somewhat more intensive (e.g., biennial haying), are more favorable for specialist insects than either intensive or inconsistent managements (Kirby 1992). In rural Sweden, historical land use over the last two centuries was more effective than current land use Z-VAD-FMK at explaining

which plant species currently lived in the grasslands (Gustavsson et al. 2007). While long-term grazing produced the most favorable floristic results currently, a consistent use of haying throughout the entire period was more favorable than switching from haying to grazing, even decades ago. Thus, conservation management needs to be retrospective to before preservation in embracing site stability (Whitehouse 2006), rather than only forward-looking after preservation and restoration begin. Attempting to turn the clock back to before anthropogenic

degradation (or before a switch to less favorable management such as haying in Sweden) can do more harm than embracing and managing to maintain the semi-natural condition of the site now (Kirby 1992). Relatively more stable site histories (e.g., long-term occupancy Thiamine-diphosphate kinase and cutting by beaver Castor canadensis) also occur for patches occupied by species such as Gillett’s checkerspot (Euphydryas gilletti) well known to inhabit patches generated in a dramatic cyclical way (stand-replacing fire) (Williams 1988). In conserved semi-natural vegetations, more consistent management (grazing) may produce higher relative numbers of localized insects than more dramatic, rotational management (Kirby 1992; Thomas and Harrison 1992). Plants versus landscape consistency causing insects It is axiomatic that increased plant diversity, especially native, increases insect biodiversity, from gardens to nature reserves (e.g., Panzer and Schwartz 1998; Burghardt et al. 2009).