Insect decline may have been going on decades before long-term monitoring started
,” says Brad Lister, of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. “We couldn’t believe the first results. I remember [in the 1970s] butterflies everywhere after rain. On the first day back [in 2012], I saw hardly any.” Dr Lister is describing the Luquillo forest of Puerto Rico, where he recently carried out a census of insect life and found it had been almost wiped out in 40 years. But he could be talking about many other places.
Even when individual species are described, the process yields only partial information. Scientists have little hard data on what the vast majority of insects eat, how mobile they are or what determines their reproductive success. There has been almost no long-term monitoring of their numbers. “Around and beneath our feet,” writes Dr Wilson, “lies the least explored part of the planet’s surface.”
The project, called the United Kingdom Butterfly Monitoring Scheme , proved such a hit with Britain’s amateur naturalists that the scientists were overwhelmed with data. Now, 2,000 volunteers monitor more than 2,500 sites and produce 3m records a year. It is by far the most detailed insect data set in the world and, unlike most, measures both whether a species occurs in an area and how abundant it is.
There have been no surveys of wild insect numbers in India, China, Siberia, the Middle East or Australia and only a single study each in South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia. These areas include almost all the tropics where the majority of insect species are thought to live.
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