New 'Insectageddon' Grant
Really excited to have received a new grant from the Hermon Slade Foundation to investigate how increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide will affect invertebrate communities in a Eucalypt woodland. The project is entitled 'Are we really heading for ‘insectageddon’? Characterising changes in Eucalypt invertebrate communities under rising CO2'
We reported how declines of around 14% had already occurred at Australia's largest climate change experiment (EucFACE) in our 2016 paper. With this grant we'll revisit this and identify who are the winners and losers using DNA meta-barcoding.
It comes on the back of several high profile papers reporting general declines in invertebrate populations. While some of these grab the headlines, rigorous recording of invertebrate populations to global climate change is actually really rare. The situation is summarized really well by Thomas, Jones and Hartley in their GCB paper.