To understand insect decline and its drivers, it is essential to identify insect population and community datasets. Relevant demographic data for insects are scattered across disparate fields, multiple languages, and often difficult-to-retrieve sources, however, posing a challenge to assembling the necessary data.
For instance, long-term insect monitoring data can be found across a sweep of disciplines:
Much relevant demographic data has been collected to examine non-entomological questions. For instance, studies of food availability for birds and other insectivores have the potential to be an important source of time-series data that have yet to be analyzed in the context of insect decline. Considerable demographic data relevant to the global status of insects also exists in gray literature: newsletters, theses, government reports, and online sites, not indexed by commonly used search engines.
Consolidating all of these disparate datasets into a central repository will help to facilitate other RCN activities and syntheses of insect decline and the drivers of decline.
The primary activities that EntoGEM works on are:
Currently, the project is focused on:
The EntoGEM project is open to anyone who wants to participate, regardless of experience with evidence synthesis or entomology! To learn more about EntoGEM or get involved, please visit the EntoGEM website or contact Eliza Grames at egrames@binghamton.edu.
Undergraduate students looking to participate in the network or get involved in entomology or conservation biology are especially encouraged to join the EntoGEM project since it provides practice reading scientific abstracts and articles, exposure to many different subfields and research methods, experience in evidence synthesis, and is an easy way to get started with minimal commitment.