00:00Taking the time to look closer at nature, you may get the chance to see a pollinator feeding on flowers and even crane flies taking flight.
00:08Insects play an important part of our ecosystem, underpinning our food chain which supports birds, mammals and other wildlife, but research is showing that their population is declining.
00:19Bugs Matter is a National Systems of Science survey of flying insect abundance, led by the Kent Wildlife Trust in partnership with the invertebrate charity Bug Life.
00:29Volunteers take part by cleaning their number plate ahead of a drive, then using the Bug Matter app they monitor their journey.
00:36Recent data collected showed there were 30% more journeys recorded in 2024 than in 2023.
00:43So when you've finished your journey, you take a photo of the number plate, using the virtual splatometer.
00:57Count the number of bug splats.
01:04Enter that in the app.
01:07Say whether it rained or not.
01:09And that's it.
01:11Submit.
01:12And that submits the bug splat counts along with the journey route.
01:16But the latest data has revealed that the number of insects sampled on a vehicle's number plate across the UK has fallen by 63% since 2021.
01:25Unfortunately, they are in decline due to all the usual factors that are affecting most biodiversity.
01:31So land cover change, loss of natural habitats, pollution, climate change, you know, all these big drivers of biodiversity loss.
01:42When you consider what the terrestrial surface of our planet looked like a few thousand years ago, we've transformed it from swains of natural habitat to huge areas of agriculture.
01:53But these small creatures may have a bigger impact than we may think.
01:57Insects and other invertebrates provide a huge number of essential services, I guess you could call them, which support human life and the life of other animals.
02:09So they do things like they pollinate our crops.
02:12They help to break down waste and recycle nutrients.
02:16And insects are food for other animals.
02:19Lots of birds, lots of fish, lots of mammals feed on insects.
02:24So they provide these services.
02:26They're these essential parts in the food chains and the functioning of the ecosystems.
02:30But they're also important in their own right.
02:32It is hoped by tracking the bug splats on vehicle number plates, we will have a better understanding
02:37of how their abundance is changing over time.
02:40Daisy Page for KMTV.
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