The Annual Reports for the All-Ireland Bumblebee Monitoring Scheme and the Irish Butterfly Monitoring Scheme have been published.
Both monitoring schemes are citizen science schemes that track population and phenology (flight) trends in Irish bumblebees and butterflies, detecting the impacts of factors such as land use and climate change on populations. For butterflies, it involves walking a fixed route (transect) on a weekly basis from April to September, when weather conditions are favourable. For bumblebees, the fixed route (transect) is walked once a month from March until October. In both schemes, the number of the different species spotted along different sections of each transect are recorded. These records are the basic data upon which the analysis is carried out.