Malaise trapping- Flying Insects

Flying insects are important parts of ecosystems, as they form a huge biomass and fulfill different functions ranging from ecosystem services (e.g., pollination, pest control, decomposition) to components of food webs (e.g., as food for birds). In 2017 the publication of Hallmann et al., “More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas,” raised a lot of concern about the decline of insect populations in science and policy. Biomass is a basic measure and often linked to a certain degree to species richness. Nowadays, species identity can easily be assessed by genetic methods like metabarcoding. The ease of access to insect community information in terms of field and laboratory work was the striking argument to set this up as a SO in eLTER. With this SO we will monitor insect communities throughout Europe and gather information about short- and long-term trends in biomass (which is a proxy for abundance) and species composition of insect communities. We combine Malaise traps with subsequent metabarcoding of insect bulk samples. As these two process steps differ completely, we separated the description into a field method and the lab method part.