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As the title may already give it away, Iāve got some VERY strong opinions on a paper published in 2017. Iām not exaggerating when I claim that everything regarding this paper ā from the study itself and the peer review process to the press coverage, uninformed laymen responses and opinions by "Fachidioten" ā is its own kind of hell that somehow managed to take all of my frustrations with academia as a whole, environmental activism and plain human idiocy and create some sort of a prime example I refer to whenever someone decides to ask me why Iām so cynical and confrontational most of the time. Itās just one out of several things that grind my gears, yet this case is only one out of two matters that truly make me angry.
The paper in question is called "More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas" and was published in quite a few journals like PLOS by the Entomological Society Krefeld. Mainstream press only ever refers to it as the "Krefeld Study".
Right off the bat, the title itself is incredibly sensationalist and those still within the research industry will spot the bullshit immediately and move on the different paper. From what I learned during the introduction year of my grammar schoolās "Seminarfach", a dedicated subject exclusive to merely three to four German states to learn more about the process of academic research by working in a group on a chosen research subject for two years, which will make up 1/3 of the Abitur (A level) grade and end with a colloquium, in which the seminar paper needs to be defended. Since the choice of research topic was up to the students themselves, the standards were roughly equal to that of a PhD thesis ā limitations being the topic itself NOT being on the pubicly available list of topics from the last ten years, the topic to be restricted to a certain period and/or location and no individual student to write more or less than eight to ten pages each and each studentās speaking time to be between ten and 15 minutes. While I only went through the mandatory introduction year, I can tell by the title alone that this paper wouldnāt have made it to the oral defense part. It does include a set period of time, yet the location is way too vague and "clickbait"-like that it would result in this paperās first deduction of points, if this were a seminar paper.
My personal beef with Germanyās chaotic school systems aside, the list of sponsors is even more worrying. It is unusually long and consists of a mix of several other NGOās ("eingetragenen Vereien") and a good chunk of state organizations, cities, universities and individuals. Before even getting into the abstract, it is already being highlighted that the data was collected at random times and locations exclusively in western Germany, NRW in particular, and the whole thing was backed largely by interest groups, politicians and individual advocates. (The constant focus on NRW, Lower Saxony, RLP and some cities like Berlin, Munich and Hamburg among the German press already is alienating enough but this study tries to suggest that those parts of Germany represent the whole world. Good grief.)
I have to admit that I did not get past the methods because all flaws already are covered up until this section.
The ecosystem services provided by wild insects have been estimated at $57 billion annually in the USA.
Iām not the type of person who tends to truly hate (and, by extension, truly love) something; the whole idea behind "ecosystem services", however, made me realize that I am able to feel true hate. This concept was conceived by academics and business people who can only perceive the world through the lenses of capitalism and utilitarianism and partially truly believe that using business lingo just to advocate for more environmentalism will work (it doesnāt and many proponents clearly donāt believe any of this nonsense, either). If any non-business matter comes with a price tag of its supposed monetary worth, itās trying to sell you something of low financial value; the higher the price on the tag, the less the value. Such estimates are ALWAYS bullshit and (intentionally) misleading.
"Ecoystem service" (Wikipedia)
For example, populations of European grassland butterflies are estimated to have declined by 50% in abundance between 1990 and 2011.
Now weāre getting into something that is uniquely Western European. All German-speaking countries, the United Kingdom and the "BeNeLux" states (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxemburg) are the only countries ā I cannot speak French and Spanish, let alone any Scandinavian language, but they may have copied this from the Brits and the Germans ā to make a huge distinction between moths and other butterflies that contributed to the widespread belief among laymen that all moths ("Nachtfalter" or "night butterflies" in German) only appear at night. Funny enough, the amount of moth species exceeds 1000, while there are only less than 400 "Tagfalter" species across Europe (less than 100 of those can be found in the wild in the United Kingdom!). Germany is even more chaotic about it and also includes Zygaenidae moths in their "Tagfalter-Monitoring" but not species like the hummingbird hawk-moth. Despite moths being much more diverse, they receive the least amount of research compared to their "day" counterparts ā most moths "look boring", may be insanely hard to keep apart from each other, many can only be observed at night and with an appropriate lamp far away from cities and its polluting lights, the study of moths is less lucrative, whatever.
This number in the quote above covers "Tagfalter" only. And only those "day butterflies" that occupy a particular type of grassland in The Netherlands.
Van Swaay et al.: "The European Butterfly Indicator for grassland species: 1990-2013" (2015)
(Is anyone else noticing that the Krefeld study claims that the Dutch study includes data from 1990 to 2011, while the Dutch studyās title says "1990-2013"? This definitely is not just some typo I personally tend to make quite often on this capsule because of my fast typing habits and my distaste towards autocorrect and highlighting, Hallmann et al. didnāt even read their own sources properly and neither did the peer reviewers.)
The total insect biomass would then be a better metric for the status of insects as a group and its contribution to ecosystem functioning, but very few studies have monitored insect biomass over an extensive period of time.
Quantity over quality. Capitalism is such a blessing.
Here, we investigate total aerial insect biomass between 1989 and 2016 across 96 unique location-year combinations in Germany, representative of Western European low-altitude nature protection areas embedded in a human-dominated landscape (S1 Fig). In all years we sampled insects throughout the season (March through October), based on a standardized sampling scheme using Malaise traps.
So, they really did choose random "low-altitude" grasslands in parts of what was once called "West Germany" and declared them"representative", even though I live and study in a very similar, "low-altitude" area located in Central Germany, in which I barely got to see butterflies as a kid due to the damage caused by East Germanyās industries and the first years after reunification, which marked a sudden boom of illegal dumpsters popping up everywhere and the mass replacement of East German companies with West German ones. (This topic deserves its own post because the amount of insects and birds I witnessed in my village when I was younger was extremely low. Things have improved noticeably despite many issues persisting over here.)
Skipping to the methods:
All trap locations were situated in protected areas, but with varying protection status: 37 locations are within Natura2000 sites, seven locations within designated Nature reserves, nine locations within Protected Landscape Areas (with funded conservation measures), six locations within Water Protection Zones, and four locations of protected habitat managed by Regional Associations. For all location permits have been obtained by the relevant authorities, as listed in the S1 Appendix. In our data, traps located in nutrient-poor heathlands, sandy grasslands, and dune habitats provide lower quantities of biomass as compared to nutrient nutrient-rich grasslands, margins and wastelands. As we were interested in whether the declines interact with local productivity, traps locations were pooled into 3 distinct habitat clusters, namely: nutrient-poor heathlands, sandy grassland, and dunes (habitat cluster 1, n = 19 locations, Fig 1A), nutrient-rich grasslands, margins and wasteland (habitat cluster 2, n = 41 locations, Fig 1B) and a third habitat cluster that included pioneer and shrub communities (n = 3 locations).
The listed types of protection statuses are being kept vague and even contradictory for some reason. Most protected areas are part of the Nature 2000 network, yet not all of them actually carry the Natura 2000 name. In fact, the vast majority of legally protected areas are not referred to it as being part of this network and, more often than not, are just FFH territories ("Flora-Fauna-Habitat"), which are even less protected than Natura 2000 locations due to FFH territories largely permitting conventional agriculture and forestry because adhering to this law is not mandatory. Some other locations are only protected on paper because their managements are entirely up to owns the area and there is little to no documentation about such locations available (one village northwest to mine offers a tiny forest that is such an area with virtually no protection whatsoever that seemingly has been abandoned entirely by its owner, yet also has not been studied by any researcher at any point and no local even being aware of its status; Iām suspecting that it only received the lowest possible status to fulfill the minimum quota of legally protected areas within Germany because the country is being sued by the EU for continiously neglecting EU-wide environmental laws).
Ignoring the "nutrient nutrient-rich grasslands" typo (which I canāt anymore), Hallmann et al. already start to address the results from one experiment and pretty much admit to have changed the parameters right after it due to the results demonstrating the opposite of what is commonly taught to apply to insects, specifically butterflies: Various butterfly guides, including the "Ulmer" published by the UfZ in Leipzig, states that nutrient-poor meadows and orchards are preferred by most butterflies and thus should be perserved and restored.
I donāt know why they made no distinctions between natural heathlands and those created by humans, in fact I donāt know why they chose heathlands in the first place, as heathland often can be a synonym for both sandy grasslands and dunes (the latter especially applying to the last natural heathlands in the Alps and on the North and Baltic Sea islands, which are literally called "dune heathlands" in German!). Putting wastelands and nutrient-rich grasslands into the same cluster is an even weirder aspect of this study because "wasteland" carries two vastly different definitions according to Wikipedia:
Taking the first definition would make this cluster a clusterfuck, relying on the second definition will tell you nothing about those areas because those can be nutrient-rich grasslands, too.
There really is no point in getting deeper into the study itself. There are so many flaws that this entire study is not just useless but a huge waste of money and resources, as well.
The German press widely covered this paper, yet made the embarrassing mistake of claiming that it received a lot of international attention. I was only able to find this very study in some other journals and one single article by The New York Times covering it, which proves that pretty much no one outside of Germany knows about it (and even NYT seems to have forgotten about it right after publishing their article because there are no follow-up articles whatsoever). Naturally, every media cited it blindly and some did not shy away from calling the results "apocalyptic" (sadly not in reference to the quality of this paper itself and what now passes as legitimate scientific research).
But it did not end there. Some Bavarians decided to "replicate" this study and not only changed the exact same parameters Hallmann et al. changed throughout their study but also choose an entirely different set of locations. The only thing that stayed consistent is the method for "capturing" flying insects and flying insects only (luring them into a trap to drown and kill them in ethanol). Iām not even gonna link to this study because it managed to be even worse than the Krefeld study, yet received nearly just as much attention from the German press as the original. Iām just speechless and on the verge of developing a migraine.
Hailed as some crucial milestone in the fight against climate change, everything dealing with the Krefeld study appears like some sort of publicity stunt, with various entities just trying to claim a piece of that cake. The study doesn't even hide its true intention and is "on the nose" about its purely economical reasonings. Despite the German press claiming otherwise, it is neither of international importance, nor helpful on a local scale ā and the few blogs that at least make a mention of a few researchers harshly criticizing this paper, nothing beyond a simple "it's flawed" and "it has got severe methodological errors" ever came out of it. The "replication study" from Bavaria did not even attempt to replicate the Krefeld study, instead it took the standarized trapping and killing method and used them at entirely new locations at their own set of random times.
This pretty much sums up the exclusivity of entomology, as well. Both papers cite other studies primarily conducted in the UK and The Netherlands, with only one "biomass" study from the US (and only then they just cited an estimated monetary value just to provide some silly price tag). Both studies do not provide the common terminology used among biologists, making up terms for biotopes at will and refusing to properly list all individual species. Any other researcher would laugh about it and move on, yet both studies were funded by German tax payers that largely are unaware of where their taxes end up and without the capability to examine such papers themselves. Both the press and prominent researchers and science journalists such as Mai-Thi Nguyen-Kim, who unironically received the Bundesverdienstkreuz for her "reporting" during the Covid pandemic (which consisted of a bunch of YouTube videos where she simply cited mainstream press articles and shared her opinions on vaccines and anti-vaxxers, even though she is just a certified chemicist that decided to NOT pursue a research career and became a YouTuber discussing teenager topics in outright cringy ways like in bathroom stall for the series "Auf Klo", which literally translates to "On Toilet").
Overall, the Krefeld study is just the tip of the iceberg and there is another study that similarly praised as a new discovery and of such high value that the EU granted the researcher ā¬2,000,000 in funds, while it merely re-confirmed that some fungi... engage in symbiosis with some plants and their roots.
"Science" really is just another highly-overvalued industry in search for the next market that can be exploited and used for some cheap propaganda during election seasons.