ArticleInsect conservation and diversity2020
Are insects declining and at what rate? An analysis of standardised, systematic catches of aphid and moth abundances across Great Britain.
Article in Insect conservation and diversity, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cinderella Biodiversity: Three Decades of Monitoring Reveal Earlier Emergence and Increasing Abundance in Undervalued and Sparsely Recorded Flying Insects and Ballooning Spiders.Global change biology · 2026Article
- Precipitation Drives the Abundance and Distribution ofBioscience · 2026Article
- The genome sequence of the Common Quaker,Wellcome open research · 2026Article
- Assessing direct effects of insect change on insectivore populations in the United Kingdom.Biodiversity and conservation · 2026Article
- Systematic Continental Scale Monitoring by Weather Surveillance Radar Shows Fewer Insects Above Warming Landscapes in the United States.Global change biology · 2025Article
- Spatio-Temporal Variation in Aerial Arthropod Abundance Revealed by Weather Radars.Global change biology · 2025Article
- Trait mediation explains decadal distributional shifts for a wide range of insect taxa.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Characterisation of riverine mosquito (Diptera: Culicidae) community structure in southern Australia and the impact of a major flood based on analysis of a 20-year dataset.Medical and veterinary entomology · 2025Article
- Article
- Wind energy and insects: reviewing the state of knowledge and identifying potential interactions.PeerJ · 2024Review
- The Present and Future of Insect Biodiversity Conservation in the Neotropics: Policy Gaps and Recommendations.Neotropical entomology · 2023Review
- Insect decline in forests depends on species' traits and may be mitigated by management.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Quantifying inherent predictability and spatial synchrony in the aphid vector Myzus persicae: field-scale patterns of abundance and regional forecasting error in the UK.Pest management science · 2023Article
- From identification to forecasting: the potential of image recognition and artificial intelligence for aphid pest monitoring.Frontiers in plant science · 2023Review
- Collation of a century of soil invertebrate abundance data suggests long-term declines in earthworms but not tipulids.PloS one · 2023Article
- Weather Sensitivity of Sugar Bait Trapping of Nocturnal Moths: A Case Study from Northern Europe.Insects · 2022Article
- The development of an unsupervised hierarchical clustering analysis of dual-polarization weather surveillance radar observations to assess nocturnal insect abundance and diversity.Remote sensing in ecology and conservation · 2022Article
- Fertility costs of cryptic viral infections in a model social insect.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Moth declines are most severe in broadleaf woodlands despite a net gain in habitat availability.Insect conservation and diversity · 2022Article
- Where and why are species' range shifts hampered by unsuitable landscapes?Global change biology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Although we have known anecdotally that insects have been declining in Great Britain for more than 100 years, insect declines have only been statistically estimated over the last 20 years. Estimation of the rate of those declines is still hotly debated, fuelled by a lack of standardised, systematically collected data.More than 24 million individual moths and aphids collected from 112 light traps and 25 12.2 m suction-traps, respectively, were analysed using mixed models. Our objective was to estimate the long-term trends in both groups based on annual totals recorded every year between 1969 and 2016.The models showed that two paradigms existed: Over 47 years, long-term linear trends showed that moths had declined significantly by -31%, but short-term trends indicated that there were periods of significant decline and recovery in most decades since the 1960s. Conversely, despite aphid annual totals fluctuating widely, this group was in a steady state over the long-term, with a non-significant decline of -7.6%. Sensitivity analysis revealed that moth trends were not driven by a group of abundant species, but the sign of the overall aphid trends may have been driven by three of the most abundant species.The spatial extent of moth trends suggests that they are extremely heterogeneous. Uniquely, moth declines were different among several habitat types, with robust significant declines found in coastal, urban and woodland habitats, but notably not in agricultural, parkland and scrubland habitats. Conversely, aphid trends showed spatial synchrony extending to 338 km, albeit with local variation.
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