In a strip of greenery between Berlin’s Natural History Museum and a busy street, bumble bees move swiftly between flowers while a ladybug makes its way along a leaf full of aphids and bugs crawl about.
Gardens, balconies, verges, fields, woods and patches of wilderness across Germany will be the scene of this year’s “insect summer,” now in its seventh year, organized by the country’s Nature And Biodiversity Conservation Union, or NABU. The environmental group has invited people to spend an hour counting the insects they see in a 10-meter (33-foot) radius.
“We have seen that a few insects that normally occur only in the south might be spreading further north,” including the violet carpenter bee, says Laura Breitkreuz, an expert on biodiversity and entomology at NABU, describing that as a sign of advancing climate change and warmer temperatures.
Over time, people appear to recognize more insects — a key goal of the citizen science project, which doesn’t aim to deliver precise…Read More
