1. Moth biomass increases and decreases over 50 years in Britain.
- Author
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Macgregor CJ, Williams JH, Bell JR, and Thomas CD
- Subjects
- Animals, Biomass, United Kingdom, Moths
- Abstract
Steep insect biomass declines ('insectageddon') have been widely reported, despite a lack of continuously collected biomass data from replicated long-term monitoring sites. Such severe declines are not supported by the world's longest running insect population database: annual moth biomass estimates from British fixed monitoring sites revealed increasing biomass between 1967 and 1982, followed by gradual decline from 1982 to 2017, with a 2.2-fold net gain in mean biomass between the first (1967-1976) and last decades (2008-2017) of monitoring. High between-year variability and multi-year periodicity in biomass emphasize the need for long-term data to detect trends and identify their causes robustly.
- Published
- 2019
- Full Text
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