Dr. Elske Tielens

I think this is an important data source for that.

But it's possible that what we're looking at is actually sort of a shifting baseline that compared to this baseline from 10 years ago, we're not seeing declines because some of these took place earlier.

30, 40 years ago when we had big land use change or agricultural intensification.

And so if you only start measuring after the declines have already happened, then you're not going to capture that.

But I think it's extra important or it sort of demonstrates why weather radar could be a really good tool for standardized monitoring.

And so 10 and 20 years later, we can come back and compare and say, oh, here's the larger time window.

Here's the bigger picture for this.

I think the Gulf is Insect Capital USA.

And I think that this is true anyway.

When you drive down there, you really notice, people talk a lot about when I was growing up, how many insects would splat on the windscreen.

You take a road trip down to Texas or down to Mississippi or coastal Georgia, and you really do see that increase.

There are so many insects out there.

And I think the other thing is the radar is really good at picking up insects that are high up in the sky.

And so areas where the conditions are really good for insects to move long distances in the sky, such as above the plains, those are also areas where we see lots and lots of insects.

So one finding from this study was that areas where in the winter we see a lot of warming, insect populations have been declining.

And there's some co-variation there with development.

Areas where we've had a lot of human development and changes in land use over the past 10 years is also areas where we see greater declines in insects.

And so in your urban areas, of course, some insects do really well, but we see fewer insects.

But thank goodness they don't fly so high and so they don't show up on the radar.

We had to develop the methods to say, how do we pick out the insects from the radar?