Title: Biodiversity in protected areas: priorities for regional biodiversity conservation

a high human population density and a high land-use turnover, species are struggling finding suitable habitats. Protected areas are a key tool in nature conservation to protect habitats, aiming to keep natural areas in pristine conditions, and to safeguard threatened species. Especially in central Europe, an area under high anthropogenic pressure, protected areas are often small and get influenced by the intensive use of the surrounding landscapes. However, few studies have assessed whether protected area networks have been effectively protecting biodiversity at the regional scale over long time scales, mainly due to the lack of biodiversity data over larger spatial and temporal scales. In this study, we aim to overcome this gap of knowledge by comparing protected to unprotected areas for the German federal state of Bavaria, an ideal study region in central Europe containing a mosaic of different land-use types, climatic zones, and a network of protected areas of different sizes and protection status. Specifically, we aim to (1) describe the current distribution of different legal protected area categories coverage along land-use as well as climate categories. Further (2) we combine this data with occurrence observations of different insect groups (dragonflies, butterflies, grasshoppers) from the species mapping database (ASK) of the Bavarian State Agency for the Environment. Our results bear potential to evaluate the effectiveness of the current protected areas network and to guide decision makers in finding new areas for safeguarding regional biodiversity.