Recent reports of insect declines across Europe and other parts of the world have emphasised the generally poor baseline that exists for assessing changes in biodiversity. One important source of untapped baseline distribution data is field notebooks, which are often associated with the collection activities of museums and other scientific institutions and may be decades or even centuries old. Over 220 field notebooks are associated with the grasshopper (Caelifera) collection in the Australian National Insect Collection, containing detailed notes on the times and places species were collected as well as vegetation and soil descriptions. In 2019, we resurveyed 45 locations from three of these notebooks from the 1940s, to assess the potential value of larger‐scale efforts in the future. We found substantial differences in grasshopper species richness and composition between the surveys; richness was generally higher in our survey, and some species showed dramatic increases in range and occurrence, whereas others remained relatively static. There was also evidence for vegetation state transitions in some areas, including increased weediness and shrub thickening, which may be associated with changes in the grasshopper fauna. We developed approaches for comparing environmental conditions across surveys and found that our species richness and abundance estimates were positively correlated with rainfall in the year preceding each survey. We conclude that further resurvey work on these field notebooks will provide a strong baseline picture of the diversity, distribution and abundance of the Australian grasshopper fauna for assessments of future change and may also give new insights about associated vegetation changes.

中文翻译：

---

蚱country国家前后：肯基（Ken Key）在澳大利亚新南威尔士州进行的远征探险的回顾，已有70年的历史了

在欧洲和世界其他地区，有关昆虫数量下降的最新报道都强调了用于评估生物多样性变化的基线普遍较差。未开发的基线分布数据的一个重要来源是野外记录本，它通常与博物馆和其他科学机构的收藏活动有关，可能已有数十年甚至数百年的历史。澳大利亚国家昆虫收藏中的蚱hopper（Caelifera）收藏有超过220个田间笔记本，其中包含有关收集物种的时间和地点以及植被和土壤描述的详细注释。在2019年，我们从1940年代的三个笔记本电脑中进行了45个地点的调查，以评估未来更大规模的努力的潜在价值。在调查之间，我们发现蚱species的物种丰富度和组成存在实质性差异。在我们的调查中，丰富度通常更高，一些物种的范围和发生率显着增加，而其他物种则保持相对静止。也有证据表明某些地区的植被状态转变，包括杂草增多和灌木增厚，这可能与蚱fauna动物区系的变化有关。我们开发了用于比较各次调查的环境条件的方法，发现我们的物种丰富度和丰度估计值与每次调查前一年的降雨量呈正相关。我们得出的结论是，在这些野外笔记本电脑上进行的进一步调查工作将为多样性提供有力的基线描述，