RESEARCH ARTICLE Are pollinating hawk moths declining in the Northeastern United States? An analysis of collection records Bruce E. Young1*, Stephanie Auer1☯, Margaret Ormes1☯, Giovanni Rapacciuolo1,2☯, Dale Schweitzer1,3☯, Nicole Sears1☯ 1 NatureServe, Arlington, Virginia, United States of America, 2 Department of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York, United States of America, 3 Port Norris, New Jersey, United States of America a1111111111 a1111111111 ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. a1111111111 *
[email protected] a1111111111 a1111111111 Abstract Increasing attention to pollinators and their role in providing ecosystem services has revealed a paucity of studies on long-term population trends of most insect pollinators in OPEN ACCESS many parts of the world. Because targeted monitoring programs are resource intensive and Citation: Young BE, Auer S, Ormes M, Rapacciuolo G, Schweitzer D, Sears N (2017) Are pollinating unlikely to be performed on most insect pollinators, we took advantage of existing collection hawk moths declining in the Northeastern United records to examine long-term trends in northeastern United States populations of 26 spe- States? An analysis of collection records. PLoS cies of hawk moths (family Sphingidae) that are presumed to be pollinators. We compiled ONE 12(10): e0185683. https://doi.org/10.1371/ over 6,600 records from nine museum and 14 private collections that spanned a 112-year journal.pone.0185683 period, and used logistic generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) to examine long-term Editor: Maohua Chen, Northwest A&F University, population trends. We controlled for uneven sampling effort by adding a covariate for list CHINA length, the number of species recorded during each sampling event.