Insects have diversified through more than 450 million y of Earth’s changeable climate, yet rapidly shifting patterns of temperature and precipitation now pose novel challenges as they combine with decades of other anthropogenic stressors including the conversion and degradation of land. Here, we consider how insects are responding to recent climate change while summarizing the literature on long-term monitoring of insect populations in the context of climatic fluctuations. Results to date suggest that climate change impacts on insects have the potential to be considerable, even when compared with changes in land use. The importance of climate is illustrated with a case study from the butterflies of Northern California, where we find that population declines have been severe in high-elevation areas removed from the most immediate effects of habitat loss. These results shed light on the complexity of montane-adapted insects responding to changing abiotic conditions. We also consider methodological issues that would improve syntheses of results across long-term insect datasets and highlight directions for future empirical work.

昆虫已经在超过4.5亿年的地球多变气候中实现了多样化，但是随着温度和降水的快速变化，它们与数十年来其他人为压力源（包括土地的转化和退化）结合在一起，也带来了新的挑战。在这里，我们在总结气候变化背景下对昆虫种群进行长期监测的文献时，考虑了昆虫如何应对近期的气候变化。迄今为止的结果表明，即使与土地利用的变化相比，气候变化对昆虫的影响也可能很大。来自北加州蝴蝶的案例研究说明了气候的重要性，在这里，我们发现高海拔地区的人口下降非常严重，这些地区已从生境丧失的最直接影响中消除了。这些结果揭示了适应山地的昆虫对变化的非生物条件作出反应的复杂性。我们还考虑了一些方法论问题，这些问题将改善长期昆虫数据集的结果综合性，并为未来的实证工作指明方向。