The number of insects has been declining for years. This has already been well documented for agricultural areas. In forests, however, temporal trends are mostly studied for insect species that are considered pests. Now, a research team led by the Technical University Darmstadt have studied the trends of very many insect species in German forests. Contrary to what the researchers had suspected, the results showed: The majority of the studied species are declining. The results have been published in the scientific journal „Communications Biology“.