Author Correction: Moth biomass has fluctuated over 50 years in Britain but lacks a clear trend

Abstract

Steep insect biomass declines ('insectageddon') have been widely reported, despite a lack of continuously collected biomass data from replicated long-term monitoring sites. Such severe declines are not supported by the world’s longest running insect population database: annual moth biomass estimates from British fixed monitoring sites revealed substantial between-year biomass change but no difference in mean biomass between the first (1967–1976) and last decades (2008–2017) of monitoring. High between-year variability and multi-year periodicity in biomass emphasize the need for long-term data to detect trends and identify their causes robustly. Analysing data from the world’s longest-running insect population database, the authors find that recent declines in UK moth biomass were preceded by a larger increase.