No Simple Answers for Insect Conservation

In late 2017, ecologist Caspar Hallmann of Radboud University in the Netherlands and his colleagues published an analysis of data from the Entomological Society Krefeld in Germany that showed a decline of more than 70 percent in flying insect biomass (the volume of living matter) over a 27-year period. A year later, ecologists Bradford Lister of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Andres Garcia of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México published a study from the Luquillo Experimental Forest in Puerto Rico suggesting a long-term decline in arthropod biomass and a restructuring of the area's food web because of increased local temperatures. Earlier this year, Francisco Sánchez-Bayo of the University of Sydney and Kris Wyckhuys of the University of Queensland published a review paper provocatively titled "Worldwide Decline of the Entomofauna."