90% of the species diversity is found in the Insecta, but 90% of conservation biology deals with terrestrial vertebrates and vascular plants. How can we overcome this imbalance and come to a more appropriate treatment of insects? I will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of insect collections as a source of distributional and abundance data on insects and demonstrate the use of several statistical techniques for overcoming data limitations (e.g., species-richness estimation, resampling, use of comparison areas). For all techniques examples will illustrate how these approaches can be used for assembling red lists and testing the validity of conservation-priority areas such as biodiversity hotspots.