Decline of insects in Germany is ‘frightening’, scientists warn
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The decline of insects in German forests and grassland is “frightening” particularly in the vicinity of intensively farmed land, scientists have warned.
An international research team led by scientists from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) collected more than one million insects between 2008 and 2017 at 300 sites across the German states of Brandenburg, Thuringia and Baden-Wurttemberg.
Scientists identified species unable to travel far as the most heavily impacted.
The results, published in the Nature journal on Wednesday, show that of many of the nearly 2,700 insect species have declined by over a third in ten years.
“In recent years, certain rare species could no longer be found in some of the regions studied,” TUM said in a statement.
Insect biomass in the forest the scientists studied decreased by approximately 40% since 2008 and the situation is “even more alarming” in grasslands where it has decreased to only one-third of its former level.
“A decline of that scale over a period of 10 years came as a complete surprise to us — it is frightening, but fits the picture presented in a growing number of studies,” Wolfgang Weisser, the co-initiator of the project, said.
