The global insect decline is most noticeable in species that used to be abundant

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2023-12-21 03:00

International

Image by Roy Buri from Pixabay

Have you noticed there are fewer insects around than there used to be? The global decline of insects is disproportionately affecting species that used to be abundant, according to international researchers. The meta-analysis of 57 studies found that there was a noticeable decline in the number of initially abundant species but not the number of very rare species. They also found that at the population level, species that previously had the most individuals had the strongest average declines in numbers.

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Journal/
conference: Nature

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research, Germany

Funder: German Research Foundation grant FZT 118 (R.v.K., D.E.B. and J.M.C.) and China Scholarship Council (CSC) 202104910063 (M.S.). The following funding sources were used to collect the original data we used in our analysis: National Science Foundation NSF06‐20443, 8811906, 9411976, 0080529, 0217774, DEB-0423704, DEB-1633026, DEB-1637685, DEB-1256696, DEB-0832652, DEB-0936498, DEB-1832016, DEB-0620652 DEB-1234162, OCE-9982133, OCE-0620959, OCE-1237140 and OCE-1832178, and the German Research Foundation DFG Priority Program 1374 ‘Infrastructure Biodiversity Exploratories’.

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