2026-10-12T04:15:28Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/30490937 2026-10-01T17:14:51Z category_26932 category_25750 item_type_3 month_year_10_2026

<b>Dataset: Weather Surveillance Radar measured nocturnal insect emergence rate in the UK, 2014-2021</b> Reuben O'Connell-Booth (20202978) Christopher Hassall (276461) Tommy Matthews (21399587) Mansi Mungee (14283556) Ryan R Neely (7884002) David Dufton (22529686) Julia Crook (22529688) William Kunin (22529727) Conservation and biodiversity Atmospheric sciences not elsewhere classified radar aeroecology ecology conservation biology Agri-environment schemes weather surveillance radar impact assessment causal inference BACI <p dir="ltr">Data describing the aerial abundance of insect over the United Kingdom from 2014-2021. Includes code produced for the manuscript: O'Connell-Booth, R., et al. (2026) <b>Seminatural land raises nocturnal insect source strength across England, but Agri-Environment Schemes do not: evidence from a national weather radar network.</b></p><p dir="ltr">Abstract</p><p dir="ltr">1. Agri-environment schemes comprise a major stream of conservation funding in the US, UK and EU but evidence for their effectiveness remains equivocal. Alternative, ‘land sparing’ strategies recommend increasing non-farmed, seminatural area rather than pursuing wildlife-friendly farming measures. Evaluating either strategy requires a measure of landscape-scale insect production which current monitoring struggles to provide.</p><p dir="ltr">2. Here, we develop a novel and general method for assessing the impact of large-scale insect conservation interventions using weather surveillance radar. We process dual-polarisation data from nine radars into spatially explicit time series of nocturnal insect emergence rate over 19,242 km² of England from 2014–2021, comprising 310,452 emergence events. Weather surveillance radar provides a new, low-cost, standardised measure of landscape-scale ‘source strength’ — the degree to which a landscape provides habitat from which insects can reproduce and disperse into the wider landscape.</p><p dir="ltr">3. Emergence rate was strongly related to land cover. Doubling the proportion of seminatural relative to farmed land beneath a sampling column was associated with a 38.8% increase in emergence rate (95% confidence interval: +28.2% to +50.3%), consistently across radars and robust to sensitivity analysis. Built-up cover was weakly negatively associated with emergence rate, except in North London, which appears to be a stronger insect source than the surrounding green belt.</p><p dir="ltr">4. Associations between agri-environment scheme expenditure and emergence rate were inconsistent across model specifications and radars. Evaluating the landscape-scale causal effect of agri-environment schemes across 56 before-after control-impact natural experiments involving paired intervention and control sites, we find no evidence of a positive causal effect of agri-environment scheme investment at 300, 500, 700 or 900 m above ground level.</p><p dir="ltr">5. <i>Policy implications.</i> Agri-environment schemes appear not to be increasing nocturnal insect source strength at landscape scale, whereas seminatural habitat is associated with substantially higher insect production — evidence favouring land sparing over sharing in the design of agricultural subsidies. We present an approach pairing weather surveillance radar entomology with econometric impact assessment methods, applicable to large-scale conservation interventions generally. Around 1,500 weather radars operate worldwide. We show this infrastructure can be repurposed for conservation impact assessment.</p> 2025-10-30T16:22:44Z Dataset Dataset 10.6084/m9.figshare.30490937.v2 https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/_b_Dataset_Weather_Surveillance_Radar_measured_aerial_insect_abundance_in_the_UK_2015-2022_b_/30490937 CC BY 4.0