Light Pollution Is a Driver of Insect Declines

Owens, Avalon C.S.; Cochard, Précillia; Durrant, Joanna; Farnworth, Bridgette; Perkin, Elizabeth K.; Seymoure, Brett

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3378835

Cited by 31 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 125 publications

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“…Additionally, environmental researchers have reported that LP and ELP inhibit crucial day and night-time cycles across taxa, since 30% of all vertebrates and more than 60% of all invertebrates have visual sensitivities attuned to natural low light levels, which involves the ambient illuminance of lunar cycles and starlight in the night-time environment [ 19 ]. An extensive body of empirical evidence has identified potential behavioral and physiological changes in responses induced by properties of ALAN across taxa; this includes terrestrial organisms such as bats [ 82 ], birds [ 83 ], and insects [ 16 , 84 ], micro-organisms, and aquatic species exposed to artificial lighting near waterfronts, bridges, rivers, and lakes [ 13 , 85 , 86 ].…”

Section: Development Of the Dual Perspective Of The Nightmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban Lighting Research Transdisciplinary Framework—A Collaborative Process with Lighting Professionals

Vega

Zielińska-Dabkowska

Hölker

2021

IJERPH

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Over the past decades, lighting professionals have influenced the experience of the night by brightly illuminating streets, buildings, skylines, and landscapes 24/7. When this became the accepted norm, a dual perspective on night-time was shaped and the visual enjoyment of visitors after dusk was prioritized over natural nightscapes (nocturnal landscapes). During this time, researchers of artificial light at night (ALAN) observed and reported a gradual increase in unnatural brightness and a shift in color of the night-time environment. As a consequence, ALAN has been identified as a relevant pollutant of aquatic and terrestrial habitats, and an environmental stressor, which may adversely affect a wide range of organisms, from micro-organisms to humans. Unfortunately, lighting professionals and ALAN researchers usually attempt to solve today’s sustainable urban lighting problems distinctive to their fields of study, without a dialogue between research and practice. Therefore, in order to translate research knowledge as an applicable solution for the lighting practice and to minimize the impact on the environment, a collaborative framework involving a transdisciplinary process with lighting professionals is crucial to potentially bring the practice, research, production, decision-making, and planning closer to each other. This paper presents a framework to help reduce the existing gap of knowledge, because appropriate lighting applications depend upon it. Access to less light polluted nightscapes in urban environments is just as important as access to unpolluted water, food, and air. This call for action towards sustainable urban lighting should be included in future lighting policies to solve the urgent environmental and health challenges facing our world.

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Section: Development Of the Dual Perspective Of The Nightmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban Lighting Research Transdisciplinary Framework—A Collaborative Process with Lighting Professionals

Vega

Zielińska-Dabkowska

Hölker

2021

IJERPH

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“…Plausibly, in attraction‐based trapping, a dilution effect could occur if an attractive stimulus from competing anthropogenic sources was itself increasing through time. For example, light trapping is used as a standard method for sampling moths, but in many rapidly urbanising areas, the number of competing anthropogenic sources of light has been increasing dramatically through time (Gaston et al ., ; Owens et al ., ). Thus, moth captures might decline through time simply because individuals are attracted elsewhere and are not as detectable in the monitoring traps.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…One way to monitor populations of the glow‐worm, Lampyris noctiluca (Linnaeus, 1767) (Coleoptera: Lampyridae) is by counting the numbers of glowing females per km of transect (Gardiner, ; Gardiner & Didham, ), but an increase in the intensity, or a change in the spectrum, of ambient background lighting through time (from street lights, for instance) could make it increasingly difficult to detect females, even when present. This is further complicated by the possibility that male glow‐worms have difficulty finding females against artificial background lighting, which could produce real population‐level consequences over the longer term (Owens et al ., ; A. Stewart, pers. obs).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, mortality is thought to be substantially higher for some species in artificially lit areas (e.g. where bat predation on moths is focused around streetlamps; Owens et al ., ), imposing an extreme selection pressure on some local populations. Ironically, this selection effect could also make evolving moths harder and harder to detect through time in light‐trap monitoring surveys.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Interpreting insect declines: seven challenges and a way forward

Didham

Basset

Collins

et al. 2020

Insect Conserv Diversity

334

355

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Many insect species are under threat from the anthropogenic drivers of global change. There have been numerous well‐documented examples of insect population declines and extinctions in the scientific literature, but recent weaker studies making extreme claims of a global crisis have drawn widespread media coverage and brought unprecedented public attention. This spotlight might be a double‐edged sword if the veracity of alarmist insect decline statements do not stand up to close scrutiny. We identify seven key challenges in drawing robust inference about insect population declines: establishment of the historical baseline, representativeness of site selection, robustness of time series trend estimation, mitigation of detection bias effects, and ability to account for potential artefacts of density dependence, phenological shifts and scale‐dependence in extrapolation from sample abundance to population‐level inference. Insect population fluctuations are complex. Greater care is needed when evaluating evidence for population trends and in identifying drivers of those trends. We present guidelines for best‐practise approaches that avoid methodological errors, mitigate potential biases and produce more robust analyses of time series trends. Despite many existing challenges and pitfalls, we present a forward‐looking prospectus for the future of insect population monitoring, highlighting opportunities for more creative exploitation of existing baseline data, technological advances in sampling and novel computational approaches. Entomologists cannot tackle these challenges alone, and it is only through collaboration with citizen scientists, other research scientists in many disciplines, and data analysts that the next generation of researchers will bridge the gap between little bugs and big data.

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“…In our study, we usually recorded the calls of the savanna nightjars at road intersection which have not only high levels of noise but also very bright artificial lights which attract phototactic insects 45 which consequently become hotspots for a nightjar’s foraging. For nightjars, urban lights at night not only provide benefits because of the dense aggregations of insect prey but also because of the improved visibility to better catch these flying insects 46 . Therefore, territorial defense is likely intense around these hotspots of light and food.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acoustic preadaptation to transmit vocal individuality of savanna nightjars in noisy urban environments

Liang

Walther

Jen

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

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As urbanization has expanded dramatically, the impacts of urban noise on wildlife have drawn increasing attention. However, previous studies have focused primarily on diurnal songbirds and much less on nocturnal nonpasserines such as nightjars. The savanna nightjar has recently successfully colonized urban areas in Taiwan. Using 1925 calls recorded from 67 individuals, we first investigated the individual differences of the acoustic structures; and, for those acoustic variables with significant individual differences, we examined the correlation between the acoustic structures and the ambient noise levels. We then compared the transmission efficacy of vocal individuality among three sets of acoustic variables: all acoustic variables, noise-related variables, and noise-unrelated variables. Using seven artificial frequency-shifted calls to represent seven different individuals in playback-recording experiments, we also investigated the transmission efficacy of vocal individuality and variable accuracy in three different urban noise levels (high, medium, low). We found that all 30 acoustic variables derived from the acoustic structures demonstrated significant individual differences, and 14 frequency-based variables were negatively correlated with ambient noise levels. Although transmission efficacy was significantly affected by urban noise, individuality information was still transmitted with high accuracy. Furthermore, the noise-unrelated structures (which included the maximum frequency, the maximum amplitude frequency, and the mean frequency of the call) had a significantly higher transmission efficacy of vocal individuality than the noise-related variables (which included the minimum frequency, the frequency at the start and the end of the call) in both field observation and playback-recording experiments. We conclude that these noise-unrelated acoustic features may be one of the key preadaptations for this nocturnal nonpasserine to thrive so successfully in its newly adopted urban environment.

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Light Pollution Is a Driver of Insect Declines

Cited by 31 publications

References 125 publications

Urban Lighting Research Transdisciplinary Framework—A Collaborative Process with Lighting Professionals

Urban Lighting Research Transdisciplinary Framework—A Collaborative Process with Lighting Professionals

Interpreting insect declines: seven challenges and a way forward

Acoustic preadaptation to transmit vocal individuality of savanna nightjars in noisy urban environments

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