181 long-term insect monitoring studies exist worldwide — but nearly half are in Europe alone, and Australia’s entire region accounts for just 8. Hover bars for exact counts.
Freshwater insects dominate the monitoring record. Bees - among our most critical pollinators — are among the least studied of any insect group. Click legend to toggle Terrestrial / Freshwater.
Malaise traps across 63 sites in Germany recorded flying insect biomass from 1989 to 2016. The decline cuts across urban, agricultural, and protected nature reserve sites alike. Hover for values. Click legend to isolate habitats.
Each point is one trap-year observation. Colour shows average temperature, dot size shows grassland cover. Sites surrounded by farmland consistently show lower insect biomass. Hover points for site and year details.
Citizen science records from the Atlas of Living Australia show native bee (Apidae) observations by state. Rising counts partly reflect growing participation — the real concern is how little long-term baseline data exists. Hover lines for counts. Click legend to isolate states.
Acknowledgements
This project was completed with assistance from Claude (Anthropic, 2026), used for R code structure and debugging. All visualisation design decisions, narrative framing, and data interpretation were made by the author.
References
Claude (Anthropic). (2026). Claude (claude-sonnet-4-6) [Large language model]. https://www.anthropic.com
Hallmann, C. A., et al. (2017). More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas. PLOS ONE. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185809
Atlas of Living Australia. (2026). Occurrence records. https://www.ala.org.au
Iannone, R., Allaire, J. J., & Borges, B. (2024). flexdashboard: R Markdown format for flexible dashboards [R package]. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=flexdashboard
Sievert, C. (2020). Interactive web-based data visualization with R, plotly, and shiny. Chapman and Hall/CRC. https://plotly-r.com
Wickham, H., Averick, M., Bryan, J., Chang, W., McGowan, L. D., François, R., Grolemund, G., Hayes, A., Henry, L., Hester, J., Kuhn, M., Pedersen, T. L., Miller, E., Bache, S. M., Müller, K., Ooms, J., Robinson, D., Seidel, D. P., Spinu, V., … Yutani, H. (2019). Welcome to the tidyverse. Journal of Open Source Software, 4(43), 1686. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01686
Westgate, M., Stevenson, M., Kellie, D., Newman, P., Wisniewski, M., & Balasubramaniam, S. (2023). galah: Biodiversity data from the GBIF node network [R package]. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=galah