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Reports of stark declines in invertebrate biomass prompted attention-grabbing news headlines about an ‘insect apocalypse’, fuelling public and scientific interest in the insect biodiversity crisis. However, substantial discussion has ensued regarding the magnitude and generality of these losses. In this Viewpoint, five researchers offer their views on the insect decline debate.

Long-term stability of ecological communities is vital for maintaining ecosystem functioning. Here, Blüthgen et al. show that greater land-use intensity in grasslands and forests can have negative impacts on the stability of plant and animal communities, driven primarily by variation in asynchrony between species.

Assessment of how 16 taxonomic groups in a lowland tropical forest resist and recover from anthropogenic disturbance shows the potential of protecting naturally regenerating secondary forests to reverse biodiversity losses.

How variation in species responses to climate may influence the resilience of ecological communities to environmental change is not fully understood. Here, the authors characterize the thermal niches of insect pollinator communities and show that resilience increases along a gradient of land-use intensity.

Insects are declining in many regions. Here the authors show that arthropod biomass losses in Jena Experiment and Biodiversity Exploratories time series are driven more by species loss than by species identity and abundance declines, and are mitigated by high plant diversity and low land-use intensity.

Cost-effective biodiversity monitoring through time is important for evidence-based conservation. Here, the authors show that automated bioacoustics monitoring can be used to track tropical forest recovery from agricultural abandonment, suggesting its use to assess restoration outcomes.

Analyses of a dataset of arthropod biomass, abundance and diversity in grassland and forest habitats in Germany for the period 2008–2017 reveal that drivers of arthropod declines act at the landscape level.

Agricultural intensification may negatively impact biodiversity via a number of mechanisms. Here, Gámez-Virués et al.show that landscape simplification acts as an environmental filter to homogenise grassland arthropod communities into pools of species with less specialised functional traits.

Natural regeneration is one way that forests can recover after disturbance or deforestation, in addition to active restoration or reforestation. This Review, focused on tropical forests, discusses what is known about the extent and drivers of natural forest regeneration and its potential to contribute essential functions and services to people.

The authors test whether spatial scale (plot, local and landscape) affects the supply of various ecosystem services in grasslands, finding that some services are predicted by plot-level properties while others depend more on landscape-level management.

Land use intensification is a major driver of biodiversity change. Here the authors measure diversity across multiple trophic levels in agricultural grassland landscapes of varying management, finding decoupled responses of above- and belowground taxa to local factors and a strong impact of landscape-level land use.

In addition to affecting individual species, climate change can modify species interactions. Coupling simulation models with networks between plants and animal pollinators and seed dispersers, Schleuninget al. show that animal persistence under climate change depends more strongly on plant persistence than vice versa.

Managing forests for the supply of multiple ecosystem services (ES) is key given potential trade-offs among services. Here, the authors analyse how forest stand attributes generate trade-offs among ES and the relative contribution of forest attributes and environmental factors to predict services.

Both a high number of species and abundance in multiple trophic levels are required for ecosystems to continue to provide the services humans require of them.

Removal of invasive exotic shrubs from mountaintop communities increased the number of pollinators and positively altered pollinator behaviour, which enhanced native fruit production, indicating that the degradation of ecosystem functions is partly reversible.

Analysis of a large grassland biodiversity dataset shows that increases in local land-use intensity cause biotic homogenization at landscape scale across microbial, plant and animal groups, both above- and belowground, that is largely independent of changes in local diversity.

Species richness and biomass of insects has declined on average across 140 forest sites sampled over a decade in Germany, with larger, more abundant, and carnivorous species found to be more susceptible to decline.