For 20 years, Keith Sockman, a biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, tracked everything from beetles to butterflies in the Colorado Rockies, just west of Boulder.
He found flying insect populations dropped by an average of 7% each year. The main reason? Warmer summers, especially warmer nights. Summer daily low temperatures in the area rose 0.8 Celsius per decade. Insects need cooler nighttime lows to recover, and without that break, many don’t survive.
That’s hurting more than the insect populations in this Colorado mountain environment, Sockman said.
“Insects is a really foundational group of organisms in all terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems,” he said. “They do things like nutrient cycling during decomposition, pollination of flowering plants.”
Sockman said they also feed birds and bats, and form the base of the food chain in mountain environments.
Sockman said that similar insect declines are likely happening in other alpine meadows around the world. By showing that even remote ecosystems are not immune, the study underscores the global scale of the biodiversity crisis, and adds urgency to addressing climate change, he added.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between KUNR, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio, KJZZ in Arizona and NPR, with additional support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
