There's obviously a huge issue nowadays.
We are beginning to understand that there is massive reductions in insect populations.
The data so far is showing that there's something very bad going wrong with insect numbers.
Places like Knepp are bucking the trend.
So what I'm seeing here is lots of different species, which is great,
but I'm also seeing lots of abundance and this is what's truly exciting.
I'm Dr Erica McAlister, and I'm a Senior Curator at the Natural History Museum.
And right now, I'm in a wood
at the Knepp Rewilding Estate in West Sussex.
We are collecting insects.
We're trying to help establish
or add more numbers to the baseline survey of insects here.
So I do like a nice bit of dank habitat, and this is perfect.
It's got beautiful woodland.
Next to it, a rather non-flowing stream.
But this is absolutely resplendent with flies.
One of the reasons I'm here
is I do some work with Operation Wallacea and they're a great organisation
and they are very specifically involved in training and research.
So I go to Dominica, I've gone to Romania and I come here.
And the lovely thing about here is we've got a lot of UK students,
university students who want to really develop their practical skills.
So everybody is helping each other here, it's one of those fantastic collaborations
where the students benefit by learning about the British fauna, how to do field techniques,
Knepp is benefiting because people are coming here to identify their insects,
and we're benefiting by knowing that we can use these insects for lots of different types of research.
And also knowing that we are communicating science,
we're showing how science is done.
So there's a much greater understanding
all over because of the benefits of these collaborations.
It's really important for the Museum to come to places like this and collect.
We have always had a long history of collecting in the UK,
but now it's even more important because it's collections like this
that can help us really, truly understand what is happening in our environment these days.
We have collections that go back 350 years.
The UK is an amazing place because it's one of the most described countries in the world
thanks to its long history of natural history collections,
citizen science, recording schemes and all of that.
So we keep having to add to the data and there's lots of excitement here.
They've got butterflies that are
finally turned up from Europe again that were described extinct.
There's all sorts of things, and places like this are really good for us to see
what's going on with the population to enable us to do long-term monitoring.
So we have many different methods of collecting insects,
and to make sure that we have a complete picture of the environment,
we will utilise these methods.
Right now we're doing active collecting, so we're doing sweep-netting.
So we bash the vegetation, disturb the insects into the net,
and then we pooter them out of the net, which is what I've got here.
But we also do static collecting, so we will leave out for several days
different types of collecting apparatus.
And one of those I use a lot is called a malaise trap.
And this works on the principle that when flying insects, such as bees and wasps and flies,
hit the net, they climb up and fall into the collecting pot.
And that's really good because today we are just getting the diurnal species
but when we leave out those, we get the nocturnal species
and things like that.
So it's really good to get a complete picture.
So right now we're going to finish off our sampling.
My students are dotted everywhere.
I will shepherd them up and then we will do two more sweeps
and we will take all of these back to our little camp.
And at this point, this sorting begins.
So this is great because you suddenly figure out what's in your tube.
And everyone is like, 'Oh I had no idea I had that'.
And then the fiddly bit comes, where we have to pin these and separate them.
So some will go straight into ethanol and that's very good for things
like barcoding, which we're very involved with in the Museum.
Whereas others get pinned out, and I would teach the students how to micropin.
So it's very good for them as well because a lot of them
have not had much experience in this.
So it's very good for the Museum to be helping ecologists of the future
to do these different techniques.
Although I've alluded to previously that we have a long history of recording,
we have a long history of that.
We still have massive parts of the picture missing.
And one of those is understanding insect populations as such.
So there's been some really good publications
coming out of mainland Europe looking at abundance and biomass reductions
between like 45 and 70%, which is huge figures.
We really need to get more involved and actually truly understand it.
So us going around here and recording the present absence of species is critical in understanding what's going on.
And rewilding schemes like Knepp, which is a very old one,
and regenerative agriculture and all these different projects
are really helping us to buck the trend in those numbers.