The core question that the RCN is trying to answer is: “how are insect populations changing through time and space?” To understand this phenomenon, we need a reliable understanding of how insect populations dynamics, and how different disturbances impact those dynamics. Insect populations are inherently variable: they tend to have both very high reproductive rates, enabling populations to grow quickly, and very strong responses to resources and their environments, leading to crashes. Populations of insects can vary by orders of magnitude from year to year, which makes it really hard to tease out the effect of these environmental drivers from internal population regulation mechanisms, and each species follows its own set of rules. To understand insect dynamics as a whole, it becomes essential to bring together a diverse group of experts with experience across taxa and biomes, to identify commonalities and differences in drivers of dynamics coming from different species and communities.
This working group will bring together experts from insect population ecology and dynamics. This group will develop novel time series approaches, including developing guidance on minimum data standards for establishing population trajectories, identifying periods of change in dynamics, and dis-entangling drivers from time series. The group will also develop guidance on synthesizing data from multiple populations for forecasting applications.
Please contact Eliza Grames at egrames@unr.edu if you are interested in joining this working group.