Garden invertebrates including bees, beetles, and earthworms provide essential ecosystem services and have welfare interests that garden management decisions can support or harm.
The welfare of garden invertebrates is an emerging consideration in both personal garden management and broader land use policy. As evidence for invertebrate sentience — particularly in bees and other insects — grows, the welfare implications of pesticide use, habitat destruction, and soil management become more significant. At the individual level, insecticides cause death and potentially distressing sublethal effects in non-target invertebrate species. At the population level, the collapse of invertebrate populations eliminates the ecosystem services — pollination, soil aeration, decomposition — that underpin ecological function. Garden management choices that support invertebrate populations — native planting, pesticide avoidance, habitat provision — simultaneously serve welfare and ecological goals. The scale of benefit from individual gardens aggregates across millions of domestic gardens to landscape-level significance.