Collaborative Research: Research Infrastructure: Moth Monitoring 2.0: Developing an integrated monitoring framework across life stages to understand insect declines

An award is made to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Florida, and Smith College, to develop a large-scale network to study the abundance and seasonality of moths across Eastern USA. This project will combine counts of caterpillars (juvenile moths), generated by the citizen-science project Caterpillar Count!, with counts of adult moths that will be captured by automated, non-lethal traps. Moths and caterpillars are one of the most important insect groups because they eat plants such as crops and forest trees and also serve as food for wildlife. This work will generate resources necessary to share seasonal abundance data with other scientists and the general public. Completion of this project will contribute to an effective contemporary workforce by involving students and creating educational materials. This project will also contribute to elevating scientific literacy in the general public by recruiting citizen-scientists and by organizing moth observation events during National Moth Week. Moth Monitoring 2.0 will be the first large-scale monitoring network designed to integrate abundance and phenology data across both larval and adult life stages. This network will generate data through standardized sampling protocols that will be instrumental for understanding broad-scale abundance patterns of an ecologically important insect group across a large region. This project will result in the development of new hardware and software solutions for automated monitoring, machine-learning based identification, data submission, storage, and visualization, and will create a new repository for the sharing of biological material. The work will expand the existing network of Caterpillars Count! monitoring sites, and add new functionality for monitoring by the general public. All of these data will be freely available to researchers seeking to address questions about how disturbances, including land use and other global change drivers, are impacting insect declines and ecosystem health. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.