Description
The Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (https://www.nina.no) conducts a general monitoring of terrestrial insects in Norway since 2020, on behalf of the Norwegian Environmental Agency (https://www.miljodirektoratet.no/). As of 2024, the monitoring program covers semi-natural land across all five major areas of Norway ; "Sørlandet" (south-west), "Vestlandet" (west), "Østlandet" (south-east), "Trøndelag" (middle), and "Nord-Norge" (northern). In addition, we monitor the forests in "Østlandet". Expanded coverage of forest ecosystems may occur in the future. The monitoring is based on passive sampling through malaisetraps with addition of windowtraps in forests. Identification of insects is mainly done through metabarcoding after a soft lysis of the material. Caution should be excercised when interpreting occurrences of single species, as the metabarcoding and bioinformatics may contain errors. Three possible errors to be aware of: 1) false positives of some species not present in the sample, 2) wrong asssignment of DNA-sequence to species name, 3) false negatives of species present in the sample. The bioinformatics is occationally updated for the entire dataset on the entire dataset, with more and more DNA-sequencies being assigned to a species name, and some species assignments being corrected, as the reference libraries continue to improve. This was last done after the 2024 season, and we are currently at version 2.0 of our internal bioinformatics database NorInvert. In this export, we filter out the taxonomic identifications that has been flagged as uncertain in our internal quality assessment. The sample design is expressed through a series of hierarchical event levels, that should be unpacked before analysis. We also collect a range of environmental data at the sampling sites. These are collected in the dynamicalProperties column as a JSON-string, at the hierarchical level they are related to. An R-script for unpacking the data into a more usable format is (will be) available at https://github.com/NINAnor/national_insect_monitoring Brief explanation of the hierarchical structure of the dataset: 1) The occurrence table can be joined to the event table through the parentEvent, which joins to an 2) identification event. This level exists because any sample may have gone through several identification events, possibly with differing methods. The identification events joins through its parentEvent with 3) a sampling_trap event, which designates a single trap in a single sampling event at a location. Sampling_trap events are joined through their parentEvent to a 4) locality sampling event, which is a single sampling period in a locality. Sampling events can have 1 or more traps (sampling trap events). Finally, the locality sampling events can be joined through their parentEvent to a 5) year locality event, which designates the sampling of insects in a single locality in a year. Relevant metadata or collected explanatory data is attached to each level, with the dynamicProperties column collecting the datatypes that the Darwin Event Core doesn't presently cater to. This is the second version of this dataset. This version does not contain the records with taxonomy matches that has been flagged as uncertain, according to our bioinformatics pipeline (Identification confidence LOW, MEDIUM). The full data set can be sent on request.
Data Records
The data in this sampling event resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 9,061 records.
1 extension data tables also exist. An extension record supplies extra information about a core record. The number of records in each extension data table is illustrated below.
This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.
Versions
The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.
How to cite
Researchers should cite this work as follows:
Åström J, Davey M (2025). National insect monitoring in Norway. Version 1.12. Norwegian Institute for Nature Research. Samplingevent dataset. https://ipt.nina.no/resource?r=national_insect_monitoring&v=1.12
Rights
Researchers should respect the following rights statement:
The publisher and rights holder of this work is Norwegian Institute for Nature Research. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) License.
GBIF Registration
This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: 19fe96b0-0cf3-4a2e-90a5-7c1c19ac94ee. Norwegian Institute for Nature Research publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by GBIF Norway.
Keywords
Samplingevent; Norway Østlandet Trøndelag Sørlandet Nord-Norge Insects Monitoring Metabarcoding Forest Agricultural land
Contacts
- Principal Investigator
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6114-0440
- Originator
- Principal Investigator
Geographic Coverage
As of 2024, the dataset covers the entire Norwegian mainland.
| Bounding Coordinates | South West [55.379, 2.109], North East [71.636, 31.465] |
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Taxonomic Coverage
The sampling and bioinformatics focus on insects, but other classes of Arthropods also occur in the dataset.
| Kingdom | Metazoa |
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| Phylum | Arthropoda |
Temporal Coverage
| Start Date / End Date | 2020-05-11 / 2024-10-07 |
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Project Data
No Description available
| Title | Norwegian insect monitoring (NorIns) |
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| Funding | The project is funded by the Environmental Agency of Norway. |
The personnel involved in the project:
Sampling Methods
A single malaisetrap is placed at each locality, and emptied every two weeks. At forest sites, 4 window traps are added for additional beetle catches.
| Study Extent | The monitoring program covers the entire Norway by randomly localized sampling locations. Sampling is done every two weeks starting in april at the earliest, through october at the latest. |
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Method step description:
- Metabarcoding is performed after a soft-lysis protocol. Barcoding is done by Illuma Novaseq, with 418 basepair length. A custom bioinformatics pipeline processes the data. The data is stored in an in-house database and exported to GBIF via an in-house Integrated Publishing Toolkit. More details (in norwegian) is available at: https://jenast.github.io/NorIns_report_2024
Additional Metadata
| Alternative Identifiers | 19fe96b0-0cf3-4a2e-90a5-7c1c19ac94ee |
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| https://ipt.nina.no/resource?r=national_insect_monitoring |