Event Calendar

This Fri­day, Octo­ber 29^th, from 12–1pm, we will dis­cuss the linked arti­cle at our next week­ly Jour­nal Club meet­ing. The arti­cle is titled “More than 75 per­cent decline over 27 years in total fly­ing insect bio­mass in pro­tect­ed areas”, and will be pre­sent­ed by STEM Research intern Wes Walsh.

Abstract: Glob­al decli­nesin insects have sparked wide inter­est among sci­en­tists, politi­cians, and the­gen­er­al pub­lic. Loss of insect diver­si­ty and abun­dance is expect­ed to pro­voke­cas­cad­ing effects on food webs and to jeop­ar­dize ecosys­tem ser­vices. Ourun­der­stand­ing of the extent and under­ly­ing caus­es of this decline is based onthe abun­dance of sin­gle species or tax­o­nom­ic groups only, rather than chan­gesin insect bio­mass which is more rel­e­vant for eco­log­i­cal func­tion­ing. Here, weused a stan­dard­ized pro­to­col to mea­sure total insect bio­mass using Malaise­traps, deployed over 27 years in 63 nature pro­tec­tion areas in Ger­many (96unique loca­tion-year com­bi­na­tions) to infer on the sta­tus and trend of loca­len­to­mo­fau­na. Our analy­sis esti­mates a sea­son­al decline of 76%, and mid-sum­merde­cline of 82% in fly­ing insect bio­mass over the 27 years of study. We showthat this decline is appar­ent regard­less of habi­tat type, while changes inweath­er, land use, and habi­tat char­ac­ter­is­tics can­not explain this over­allde­cline. This yet unrec­og­nized loss of insect bio­mass must be tak­en intoac­count in eval­u­at­ing declines in abun­dance of species depend­ing on insects asa food source, and ecosys­tem func­tion­ing in the Euro­pean landscape.

https://massasoit.zoom.us/my/stemresearch

Meet­ing ID: 549 554 5262

Mas­sas­oit STEM events are open to ALL Mas­sas­oit stu­dents, fac­ul­ty, and staff. 

Mas­sas­oit Com­mu­ni­ty Col­lege encour­ages per­sons with dis­abil­i­ties to par­tic­i­pate in its pro­grams and activ­i­ties. If you antic­i­pate need­ing any type of accom­mo­da­tion or have ques­tions relat­ed to access for this event, please con­tact the Divi­sion of Sci­ence and Math­e­mat­ics at sciencemath@massasoit.edu in advance of your par­tic­i­pa­tion or visit.