I’ve known I wanted to be a biologist since I was about seven years old. I’ve always been fascinated by animals, and my first words were animal names. My talent for entomology didn’t become clear until my first year at Wageningen University, when during the fauna course, it turned out I knew the names of the taxa already. During my Msc project, I was able to apply this entomological knowledge for the first time, and learned to identify hoverflies that we collected in crop field margins.
After my Msc work, I first left academia for three years, and spent most of my time making music. But I had always known that playing hardcore punk wouldn’t pay my bills; so, when the musical success declined, I started looking for a PhD position where I could work on insect biodiversity.
This opportunity came in the form of a research project on the effects of conservation grazing on salt marsh arthropod biodiversity at the University of Groningen, for which I learned to identify many different insect groups, such as hoverflies, ground beetles, and plant-and leafhoppers, as well as spiders. After this, I had the opportunity to work in the famous Dutch rewilding reserve Oostvaardersplassen for a year. This work opened the door to my first contact with iDiv, where I was invited to join a workshop on rewilding in 2016.
This conservation-related research was always of short duration, which felt unsatisfactory to me, so I became interested in the long-term dynamics of insect communities. Through my PhD project, I had already gotten a connection to the longest-running time series of terrestrial insect monitoring in the world, which started in 1959 in the north of The Netherlands. I was first able to work on this topic at the Czech Academy of Sciences in České Budějovice in 2015, which set me up for writing an sDiv project proposal to come to work with Jon Chase (iDiv, MLU) and Diana Bowler (iDiv alumni). I arrived in Leipzig in 2017, just before the big news of the ‘insect apocalypse’ went through the media. To us, it was clear that a global synthesis of insect time series was needed. This work culminated in our 2020 paper, and after my time at sDiv ended, Jon let me continue my work in his group.
Since 2022, I’m in iDiv’s Senior Scientist programme, and have been developing my own research programme. I largely focus on two themes: disentangling the causes of insect declines, and the development of new insect monitoring technologies, so that we will have better data to understand such changes in the future. My work on monitoring technologies started in 2021, when Diana Bowler and I organized a workshop on this topic, where we invited experts from across Europe. This has led to some fruitful collaborations, leading to several papers, a special issue, the networking project InsectAI, as well as my ongoing research project LEPMON. In addition, I’m on the board of two entomological societies: the ground beetle foundation WBBS, and the Central European Auchenorrhyncha working group (AK Zikaden Mitteleuropas e.V.).
Contact: roel.klink@idiv.de