Led by researchers at the Natural History Museum (NHM) of Los Angeles County, the study marks a figurative explosion in the number of insect species in the Golden State. The vast gulf between the earlier and new estimates of insect life deepens the urgency of conserving the wild places these insects call home. The authors found that essentially every site studied had its own unique insect community.

This finding comes from the work of the California Insect Barcode Initiative (CIBI), a project to collect and identify every species of insect in the state. Researchers have long known that insects are underrepresented in large-scale conservation assessments despite being the most diverse group of animals on land.

To address this deficit, institutions including the California Department of Food and Agriculture, UC Berkeley, UC Riverside, San Diego Natural History Museum and the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco worked alongside NHM researchers to DNA barcode more than 1 million insect specimens, and this finding marks the first publication from this undertaking.

A new study published in the journal Ecography finds that there are more than 60,000 different species of insects in California—and scientists have only described about two-thirds of them.

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