Widespread insect losses are a critical global problem. Mitigating this problem requires identifying the principal drivers across different taxa and determining which insects are covered by protected areas. However, doing so is hindered by missing information on most species owing to extremely high insect diversity and difficulties in morphological identification. To address this knowledge gap, we used one of the most comprehensive insect DNA metabarcoding data sets assembled (encompassing 31,846 flying insect species) in which data were collected from a network of 75 Malaise traps distributed across Germany. Collection sites encompass gradients of land cover, weather, and climate, along with differences in site protection status, which allowed us to gain broader insights into how insects respond to these factors. We examined changes in total insect biomass, species richness, temporal turnover, and shifts in the composition of taxa, key functional groups (pollinators, threatened species, and invasive species), and feeding traits. Lower insect biomass generally equated to lower richness of all insects and higher temporal turnover, suggesting that biomass loss translates to biodiversity loss and less stable communities. Spatial variability in insect biomass and composition was primarily driven by land cover, rather than weather or climate change. As vegetation and land-cover heterogeneity increased, insect biomass increased by 50% in 2019 and 56% in 2020 and total species richness by 58% and 33%, respectively. Similarly, areas with low-vegetation habitats exhibited the highest richness of key taxa, including pollinators and threatened species, and the widest variety of feeding traits. However, these habitats tended to be less protected despite their higher diversity. Our results highlight the value of heterogeneous low vegetation for promoting overall insect biomass and diversity and that better protection of insects requires improved protection and management of unforested areas, where many biodiversity hotspots and key taxa occur.

The Duffing equation containing a cubic nonlinearity is probably the most popular example of a nonlinear oscillator. For its harmonically excited, slightly damped, and softening version, stationary large amplitude solutions at subcritical excitation frequencies are obtained when standard semi-analytical methods like Harmonic Balance or Perturbation Analysis are applied. These solutions have the shape of a nose in the amplitude-frequency diagram. In prior work, it has been observed that these solutions may contain large errors and that high ansatz orders may be necessary when applying the Harmonic Balance or other semi-analytical methods to make them converge. Some of these solutions are observed to be asymptotically stable, while in most cases, they are unstable. The current paper aims to give a descriptive explanation for this behavior of the nose solutions, which is mainly related to the exact solution of the free undamped vibrations. Based on this, approximations of the nose solutions are calculated with a procedure combining properties of Perturbation Analysis and Harmonic Balance. Therein, the exact solution of the free undamped vibrations is taken as the zeroth approximation, while higher-order solution parts are calculated by balancing the harmonics, and the phase shift of the zeroth approximation is calculated by a residuum minimization. This method just requires the solution of a system of linear algebraic equations, while systems of nonlinear algebraic equations have to be solved in the case of directly applying Harmonic Balance.

With the commitment of more and more universities to decrease greenhouse gas emissions, standardizing the modeling is now becoming urgent. To date, published climate-relevant emissions can be based on completely different and incomparable accounting methods, as shown with results between 6 and 2696 t CO2e for the use phase of the same campus. This article aims to identify, compare, and evaluate the different modeling approaches behind this. For this purpose, this article proposes basic attributes of emissions modeling and reporting. Of the three established approaches to emissions accounting, sector logic (territorial carbon accounting) produces the lowest figures. Reporting in accordance with the greenhouse gas protocol, which has become established worldwide, can also shift the responsibility outside the institutional consumer. Life-cycle assessment, instead, essentially includes provision costs triggered by the consumer. The different modeling approaches also overlap with different coverage of emission sources, for which a standard set is being proposed. Such emissions modeling should finally lead to the determination of university-specific climate performances, i.e., the CO2e emissions per capita and per m2 of gross floor area. Infrastructure and procurement expenses must be recorded in addition and converted to an annual average.

Mitigating ongoing losses of insects and their key functions (e.g. pollination) requires tracking large-scale and long-term community changes. However, doing so has been hindered by the high diversity of insect species that requires prohibitively high investments of time, funding and taxonomic expertise when addressed with conventional tools. Here, we show that these concerns can be addressed through a comprehensive, scalable and cost-efficient DNA metabarcoding workflow. We use 1815 samples from 75 Malaise traps across Germany from 2019 and 2020 to demonstrate how metabarcoding can be incorporated into large-scale insect monitoring networks for less than 50 € per sample, including supplies, labour and maintenance. We validated the detected species using two publicly available databases (GBOL and GBIF) and the judgement of taxonomic experts. With an average of 1.4 M sequence reads per sample we uncovered 10,803 validated insect species, of which 83.9% were represented by a single Operational Taxonomic Unit (OTU). We estimated another 21,043 plausible species, which we argue either lack a reference barcode or are undescribed. The total of 31,846 species is similar to the number of insect species known for Germany (~35,500). Because Malaise traps capture only a subset of insects, our approach identified many species likely unknown from Germany or new to science. Our reproducible workflow (~80% OTU-similarity among years) provides a blueprint for large-scale biodiversity monitoring of insects and other biodiversity components in near real time.

Terrestrial cyanobacteria grow as phototrophic biofilms and offer a wide spectrum of interesting products. For cultivation of phototrophic biofilms different reactor concepts have been developed in the last years. One of the main influencing factors is the surface material and the adhesion strength of the chosen production strain. In this work a flow chamber was developed, in which, in combination with optical coherence tomography and computational fluid dynamics simulation, an easy analysis of adhesion forces between different biofilms and varied surface materials is possible. Hereby, differences between two cyanobacteria strains and two surface materials were shown. With longer cultivation time of biofilms adhesion increased in all experiments. Additionally, the content of extracellular polymeric substances was analyzed and its role in surface adhesion was evaluated. To test the comparability of obtained results from the flow chamber with other methods, analogous experiments were conducted with a rotational rheometer, which proved to be successful. Thus, with the presented flow chamber an easy to implement method for analysis of biofilm adhesion was developed, which can be used in future research for determination of suitable combinations of microorganisms with cultivation surfaces on lab scale in advance of larger processes.