A participatory study has just been carried out in Great Britain to find out the population of insects. A study conducted at the initiative of two British environmental foundations.
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To determine the number of insects in the wild, volunteer motorists had to clean their license plates before and after driving. On each trip, they then had to see, using a smartphone application, how many insects had been struck by the surface of this plate. The application made it possible to integrate into the calculation: both the distance, the speed of the vehicle, the landscapes crossed, the weather, and the time of the trip with the aim of ultimately determining the number of insects struck per kilometer.
Three measurement campaigns were carried out between 2004 and 2021 and 16,000 journeys were analysed. The number of insects found on British license plates has fallen by 72% in the space of 17 years. The study was not carried out continuously, but it is a significant and disturbing figure. Because the researchers then succeeded in extrapolating it and they concluded that the populations of flying insects have collapsed by 60% throughout the United Kingdom since 2004. Results which unfortunately join those of several Dutch studies, French and German, which have also highlighted a loss of 75 to 80% of the biomass of flying insects over the last 20 years.
The population collapse is sudden. Scientists make a link with the use of pesticides, and with agricultural intensification. Very recently, researchers at University College London also demonstrated a correlation with global warming by studying 20,000 different species of insects in 6,000 regions of the globe.
So what to do? Beyond the fight against greenhouse gases and the reduction of pesticides, the researchers stress the urgency of preserving hedges and wooded areas in agricultural areas because they serve as a habitat for these insects and their shade also partially protects against heat. These are crucial protections because these insects are essential in our ecosystems: they break down organic matter, control certain crop pests, themselves serve as food for birds and above all many of them are pollinators. 90% of wild flowering plants and above all a third of the world’s agricultural production depend on it.