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Critical review needed to judge the significance of the conclusons of this paper

Posted by kbooij on 24 Oct 2017 at 14:07 GMT

Looking at the data underlying this paper makes me feel uncomfortable the ease by which conclusuiosn are drawn from weak data.The data were not collected for trends analysis; only one trap was used per location; only a few locations were resampled more often. All years with only 1 or 2 locations can hardly considered as a serious estimate for insect abundance, the exposure time greatly varies by years negelecting the impact of insect phenology and natural fluctuations in activity, the years 1989 and 2014 are strongly overpresented and more kinds of biases makes the data set very unbalanced. Qalitatively, the data may indicate a signal of insect biomass decline, but too many hard conclusions about the dramatic decline and speculation about the causes are disputable. I hope more ecologists, statisticians and entomologist will critically look at this paper to judge its significance and to ask for better data.

No competing interests declared.