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  • Matters Arising
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Weather anomalies cannot explain insect decline

Nature volume 639, pages E7–E11 (2025) Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 12 March 2025

The Original Article was published on 27 September 2023

arising from: J. Müller et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06402-z (2023).

After a long-term study signalled a 76% drop in insect biomass in less than three decades in German-protected nature areas1, insect declines are now assigned to a multitude of anthropogenic factors2,3. A recent reanalysis4 of the insect biomass data of a previous study1 has suggested, however, that the declines are well explained by time-lagged weather anomalies, whereas new data collected by another study4 suggest that the declining trend has reversed in recent years (after 2016). Here we render these conclusions as invalid, on the basis of a critical review of methods and a reanalysis of the results. With evidence for insect biomass declining further, we argue for more standardized research to examine future trends and rigorous statistics to uncover the relative importance of contributing factors.

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Fig. 1: Flying insect biomass from four studies using Malaise traps in Germany.
The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
Fig. 2: Lack of weather anomaly effects.
The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.

Data availability

Data of the NRW as well as habitat classification of the validation data and R code can be found on Zenodo16 (https://zenodo.org/records/14258659). All other datasets can be retrieved from the respective sources (refs. 1,4,5).

References

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Acknowledgements

The Project DINA was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and handled by the VDI Project Management Agency (grant number FKZ 01LC1901). The North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) monitoring was funded by the State Agency for Nature, Environment and Consumer Protection (LANUV) and the Ministry of the Environment, Nature Conservation and Transport of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (MUNV). Conceptual framework and development of methodologies of the Entomological Society Krefel was funded by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection (BMUV), handled by the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN; grant number FKZ 3516850400). We thank J. Müller and colleagues for constructive discussion.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Radboud Institute for Biological and Environmental Sciences, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Caspar A. Hallmann, Eelke Jongejans, Henk Siepel & Hans de Kroon

  2. Entomological Society Krefeld (EVK), Krefeld, Germany

    Caspar A. Hallmann, Thomas Hörren & Martin Sorg

  3. NIOO-KNAW, Animal Ecology, Wageningen, The Netherlands

    Eelke Jongejans

  4. Faculty of Biology, Aquatic Ecology, University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany

    Thomas Hörren

  5. Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU), Berlin, Germany

    Roland Mühlethaler & Gerlind U. C. Lehmann

  6. Evolutionary Ecology, Humboldt University Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Gerlind U. C. Lehmann

Authors
  1. Caspar A. Hallmann
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  2. Eelke Jongejans
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  3. Thomas Hörren
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  6. Roland Mühlethaler
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  7. Gerlind U. C. Lehmann
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  8. Hans de Kroon
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Contributions

C.A.H., M.S., E.J., T.H., H.S. and H.d.K. conceived the idea of the article. M.S. and T.H. obtained additional information on trap locations. C.A.H. performed the statistical analysis. T.H., G.U.C.L. and R.M. provided additional validation data. All authors wrote the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Caspar A. Hallmann.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Table 1 Sampling-habitat overview
Full size table
Extended Data Table 2 Decomposition of weather and habitat effects on the average (log) daily biomass from the validation data of4
Full size table

Supplementary information

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This file contains Supplementary Notes, Supplementary Methods, and Supplementary References.

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Hallmann, C.A., Jongejans, E., Hörren, T. et al. Weather anomalies cannot explain insect decline. Nature 639, E7–E11 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08528-0

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