Dr. Elske Tielens

And so there has to be sort of sufficient signal, sufficient density of insects for our methods to be able to differentiate and say, okay, this is real insects, right?

No, not at all.

The radar totally doesn't know and doesn't care.

And that's an interesting thing about this tool.

It's really good for quantifying abundances and looking at a standardized way of measuring how many insects are out there.

It's the same tool.

across all these different radars across different regions across the entire United States.

But if you wanted to know more about what's happening specifically with this population or that, then you need to combine it with sort of local surveys or citizen science or other types of tools that we have.

Yeah, interestingly, we sort of expected everyone's been really worried about insect declines.

Obviously, there's a lot of studies demonstrating that insect biodiversity is going down, and in many species, insect abundances have been declining over the past 10-something years.

And so we sort of expected to find widespread declines, and instead we found that

At the continental scale, insect abundances are pretty stable.

There's areas where they're declining and there's areas where they're increasing.

And it sort of offsets each other that over the 10-year period, we don't see a strong trend.

That's exactly right.

You've got winners and losers, probably.

Some species doing really well.

And the species that we know sort of don't handle anthropogenic change so well maybe are declining.

And so there's a balancing act happening of increases and declines in different species that results in this stable trend.

Yeah, I mean, that's a really good question.