Abstract Climate change is one of the main drivers of a global insect decline. Stoneflies (Insecta: Plecoptera) have one of the highest local extinction rates among insects, in part due to their requirements for cold, highly oxygenated, unpolluted water. Investigating the population structure of stonefly species is integral to their conservation as it can identify populations at risk of localized extinction. In this study, we extracted DNA from Nemoura arctica (Esben‐Petersen, 1910), Nemoura cinerea (Retzius, 1783) and Nemurella pictetii (Klapálek, 1900) specimens collected across Arctic Alaska, Sweden and Finland. We sequenced the mitochondrial COI gene and the nuclear 28S gene of 96 specimens from 9 locations and constructed haplotype networks for these three species by combining our sequences with publicly available sequences of circumboreal stoneflies from the Barcode of Life Database (BOLD) and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) GenBank. Haplotype networks suggest that N. arctica and N. cinerea have higher COI genetic diversity than N. pictetii , with potential evidence for the description of new species. We modeled past, present and future habitat suitability using species distribution models (SDMs) in the program Wallace v2.1.3. Our models predict that all three species will lose most or all of their current suitable habitat by 2070, no matter the climate scenario.
Mirghani et al. (Wed,) studied this question.