More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas

By C. Hallmann, M. Sőrg, Eelke Jongejans, H. Siepel, Nick Hofland, H. Schwan, W. Stenmans, A. Müller, H. Sumser, Thomas Hörren and 2 more. PLoS ONE, 2017

2,933 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Global declines in insects have sparked wide interest among scientists, politicians, and the general public. Loss of insect diversity and abundance is expected to provoke cascading effects on food webs and to jeopardize ecosystem services. Our understanding of the extent and underlying causes of this decline is based on the abundance of single species or taxonomic groups only, rather than changes in insect biomass which is more relevant for ecological functioning. Here, we used a standardized protocol to measure total insect biomass using Malaise traps, deployed over 27 years in 63 nature protection areas in Germany (96 unique location-year combinations) to infer on the status and trend of local entomofauna. Our analysis estimates a seasonal decline of 76%, and mid-summer decline of 82% in flying insect biomass over the 27 years of study. We show that this decline is apparent regardless of habitat type, while changes in weather, land use, and habitat characteristics cannot explain this overall decline. This yet unrecognized loss of insect biomass must be taken into account in evaluating declines in abundance of species depending on insects as a food source, and ecosystem functioning in the European landscape.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/332d4e7950ea583b7755f37fadf8c536d35876c1

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Citations in the corpus

Vertebrates on the brink as indicators of biological annihilation and the sixth mass extinction (2020, positive): “About 75% of all flying insects in national parks in Germany disappeared in 25 y (16), and there are numerous signs that many species of insects are heading for the exit (34, 35).”
Declining abundance of beetles, moths and caddisflies in the Netherlands (2019, background): “In response to the findings in Germany, and commissioned by the Dutch ministry of environment and agriculture, Kleijn et al. (2018) identified a list of existing data sets potentially suitable to derive trends for insects species in the Netherlands, and to allow for comparison to the German case.”
Further evidence for a global decline of the entomofauna (2020, background): “Following the recent publication of several reports on the decline of insects and other arthropods in areas of Europe and Central America (Hallmann et al. 2017; Lister and Garcia 2018; Seibold et al. 2019; van Strien et al. 2019; Hallmann et al. 2020) as well as our review of patterns at the global…”
Digital Sustainability and Entrepreneurship: How Digital Innovations Are Helping Tackle Climate Change and Sustainable Development (2020, background): “Even seemingly more solvable problems like finding out the root causes of bee hive collapse remain largely unsolved (Hallmann et al., 2017).”