Author: Wagner, David L.; Grames, Eliza M.; Forister, Matthew L.; Berenbaum, May R.; Stopak, David
Description: Nature is under siege. In the last 10,000 y the human population has grown from 1 million to 7.8 billion. Much of Earth’s arable lands are already in agriculture, millions of acres of tropical forest are cleared each year, atmospheric CO2 levels are at their highest concentrations in more than 3 million y, and climates are erratically and steadily changing from pole to pole, triggering unprecedented droughts, fires, and floods across continents. Indeed, most biologists agree that the world has entered its sixth mass extinction event, the first since the end of the Cretaceous Period 66 million y ago, when more than 80% of all species, including the nonavian dinosaurs, perished. Although a flurry of reports has drawn attention to declines in insect abundance, biomass, species richness, and range sizes, whether the rates of declines for insects are on par with or exceed those for other groups remains unknown. There are still too little data to know how the steep insect declines reported for western Europe and California’s Central Valley–areas of high human density and activity–compare to population trends in sparsely populated regions and wildlands. Long-term species-level demographic data are meager from the tropics, where considerably more than half of the world’s insect species occur …
Subject headings: Animals; Extinction, Biological; Humans; Insecta; Insects; Climate change
Publication year: 2021
Journal or book title: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Volume: 118
Issue: 2
Pages: e2023989118
Find the full text: https://www.strategian.com/fulltext/Wagner2021.pdf
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Serial number: 4165