Missing Canadian Insects
What’s the gap?
Of the estimated 80 000 species in Canada, only about half have been recorded on iNaturalist, as highlighted in this iNaturalist blog post. This challenge specifically targets the thousands of missing insects among them. Can you be the first to find them?
Curious about other missing species in Canada? We’ve created separate projects targeting fungi, plants, and other animals missing from Canada, which you can find in our challenge list. Observations of these species will only count towards these separate challenges.
Did you know?
2010 is often considered to be the ‘baseline’ condition for biodiversity indicators of the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework. Without recent enough data, scientists can’t confidently understand Canadian wildlife, nor propose accurate conservation actions. Since 2010 roughly lines up with the creation of iNaturalist, this means that key biodiversity data is created when missing insects are published on iNaturalist!
Where should you go & what should you look for?
Missing insects could be found across the country. For suggestions on where certain missing insects could be found, check out this blogpost which maps out where they’ve been seen before.
Observations must fall within a set list of missing insects, listed here.
How do you join?
By observing species from this list, anywhere in Canada, your observations will count in the Missing Canadian Insects challenge.
Who made this challenge?
This challenge was inspired by an iNaturalist blog post inviting Canadians to look for Canadian insects not yet recorded on the platform. The challenge was created by undergraduate students Ryan Hull, Leeya Nagpal, and Maho Horikawa from the Quantitative Biodiversity Lab, led by Laura Pollock at McGill University.