The Night Life: A Community-Based Network for Moth Monitoring and Public Engagement

Image from facets-2024–0298 Figure 1. Moth wall located in Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada (top left) in use during National Moth Week (right); six luna moths (Actias luna) on a moth wall located at Kouchibouguac National Park, New Brunswick, Canada (bottom left).

Despite their importance in most ecosystems on earth and their biodiversity, relatively little is known about moths.

We still lack fundamental data on the distribution of many species for most areas. Data on the diversity and distribution of moths is particularly important in light of climate change, direct human activities, and that many native species appear to be declining.

Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.

Here, we present a network of simple infrastructure that serves twofold: allows direct engagement with the public on the importance of nocturnal insects and provides a means to collect scientific data on moth distribution, and share data via online depositories for scientists, landscape managers and other stakeholders.

There has been good ‘buy in’ from many communities and jurisdictions already interested in communicating science for pest insect and biodiversity monitoring that can inform management decisions.

This project has yielded a good deal of data at the local scale on species diversity, but also new jurisdictional (provincial) records.

Read the paper — Moth walls: shedding light on moth biodiversity by Joseph J. Bowden, Avalon Owens, Kayla Brown, Robert W. Harding, Marianne Graversen, Maxim Larrivée, Kent McFarland, Tyler A. Miller, Jamie Warren, and Jodi O. Young.