Climate change models often assume similar responses to temperatures across a species range, but local adaptation or phenotypic plasticity can lead plants and animals to respond differently to temperature in different parts of their range. To date, there have been few tests of this assumption at the scale of continents, so it is unclear if this is a large-scale problem. Here, we examined the assumption that insect taxa show similar responses to temperature at 96 sites in grassy habitats across North America. We sampled insects with Malaise traps during 2019-2021 (N = 1041 samples) and examined the biomass of insects in relation to temperature and time of season. Our samples mostly contained Diptera (33%), Lepidoptera (19%), Hymenoptera (18%), and Coleoptera (10%). We found strong regional differences in the phenology of insects and their response to temperature, even within the same taxonomic group, habitat type and time of season. For example, biomass of nematoceran flies increased across the season in the central part of the continent, but it only showed a small increase in the northeast and a seasonal decline in the southeast and west. At a smaller scale, insect biomass at different traps operating on the same days was correlated up to about 75 km apart. Large-scale geographic and phenological variation in insect biomass and abundance has not been studied well, and it is a major source of controversy in previous analyses of insect declines that have aggregated studies from different locations and time periods. Our study illustrates that large-scale predictions about changes in insect populations, and their causes, will need to incorporate regional and taxonomic differences in the response to temperature.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 66. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 16 February 2024.
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#822,790
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Outputs from Ecology
#300
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Outputs of similar age
#14,578
of 450,584 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Ecology
#5
of 86 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,599,069 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 97th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 8,339 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 14.2. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 96% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 86 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 94% of its contemporaries.
