Museum collections are at risk from insects. A changing climate or increased amounts of imported materials, exhibition loans and international travel, can increase exotic species. Heritage properties are often monitored for pests, so we used trapping data from 31 Austrian museums, libraries and storerooms. The carpet beetles Anthrenus spp. and Attagenus spp. studied here, showed that the catch of these two species in buildings was correlated. Unheated libraries show high catch rates for Anthrenus spp., Attagenus spp. seemed more often caught in heated/urban museums. Anthrenus verbasci, Anthrenus olgae and Anthrenus museorum account for almost 98% of our catch. Anthrenus verbasci and Anthrenus olgae are commonly found occurring together suggesting they form a core ecological pair, found in most buildings. Rarer Anthrenus fuscus appears typically at locations lacking winter heating. Attagenus smirnovi and Attagenus unicolor accounted for 95% of this genus in the buildings. There are notable differences in the types of carpet beetle across European heritage environments. Anthrenus olgae, often trapped in Austria, is uncommon elsewhere, while Anthrenus sarnicus, fairly common in the UK, is rare elsewhere. Not enough is known about the range of heritage insects across Europe, which is increasingly relevant to management under a changing climate.

The insect threat to heritage objects can increase with climate change, increased travel, movement of goods and loan exhibitions. This study used catch from 30 heritage environments across Austria. Overall arthropod catch rate in storerooms was lower than in museums and libraries. Taxonomic richness of the ecosystem in the buildings was a product of building size, perhaps paralleling island biogeography. Heritage pests are distributed independently and follow environmental gradients, perhaps aligning with Henry Gleason’s continuum theory of ecological communities. Catch rates for some abundant pests are evenly distributed among buildings (e.g., Psocoptera booklice, Lepisma saccharinum common silverfish), but Tineola bisselliella, the webbing clothes moth, is unevenly distributed because some locations have large infestations. Rare species are unevenly distributed, as these are found in only a few buildings. A characteristic set of insect pests appear to dominate indoor heritage environments in Austria: Psocoptera, Lepismatidae silverfish, Tineola bisselliella webbing clothes moth and carpet beetles like Anthrenus spp. and Attagenus spp. These pests are also common in the interiors of heritage buildings in some other European countries.

Climate change increases the importance of maintaining environmental conditions suitable for preventive conservation within museums. The microclimates at the Natural History Museum of Vienna, a large national collection housed within a classical building, were studied using >200 data loggers placed from mid 2021 to provide thermo-hygrometric measurements at 15 min intervals. Daily mean temperatures showed exhibition halls typically had the warmest rooms. This was due to the heating in winter and open windows on summer days. The halls can become even hotter than the outside temperature. In winter, most areas of the museum were very dry, as heating lowered the relative humidity, typically to 25–35% for the coldest season. Opening hours imposed daily and weekly cycles on the internal climate. There was little difference between sunny and shaded parts of the building or adjacent offices, corridors and depots. Similarly, the microclimate at the floor resembled that of the room air some ~2 m above. Mechanically controlled microclimates in cold storage areas maintained 10 °C and relative humidity ~50%, but this had become increasingly difficult in hot summers. While there was little apparent damage to the collection, at times, the museum had an extreme indoor climate: very hot in the summer and dry in the winter.

Within museum depots, the largest part of all heritage collections is stored. Often, the preservation of highly sensitive objects is an ongoing challenge, as the materials are constantly subjected to and influenced by ever-present environmental factors—above all the surrounding climate and other physicochemical processes. Biological degradation is also a major risk for collections. Fungal infestation poses a particular threat, in many regions increasingly the result of climate change. Models for damage prediction and risk assessment are still underdeveloped and require a more substantial database. Approaching this need, nine museum depots and archives were selected in this study. Two years of monitoring the indoor microclimate with thermohygrometric sensors, investigating fungal abundance and diversity through culture-dependent and -independent (metagenomics) approaches, and the collection of relevant additional information resulted in a vast amount of diverse data. The main fungal genera identified through cultivation were Cladosporium, Penicillium, Aspergillus, Alternaria and Epicoccum. The cultivation-independent approach identified Aspergillus, Pyronema, Penicillium, Xenodidymella and Blumeria as the main taxa. Data analyses indicated that key drivers involved in similarities, patterns and differences between the locations were their geographic location, immediate outdoor surroundings and indoor (micro)climatic fluctuations. The study also sheds light on a possible shift in focus when developing strategies for preventing mold growth in collection depots beyond the prevailing path of tightest possible climate control.

MotivationHere, we make available a second version of the BioTIME database, which compiles records of abundance estimates for species in sample events of ecological assemblages through time. The updated version expands version 1.0 of the database by doubling the number of studies and includes substantial additional curation to the taxonomic accuracy of the records, as well as the metadata. Moreover, we now provide an R package (BioTIMEr) to facilitate use of the database.Main Types of Variables IncludedThe database is composed of one main data table containing the abundance records and 11 metadata tables. The data are organised in a hierarchy of scales where 11,989,233 records are nested in 1,603,067 sample events, from 553,253 sampling locations, which are nested in 708 studies. A study is defined as a sampling methodology applied to an assemblage for a minimum of 2 years.Spatial Location and GrainSampling locations in BioTIME are distributed across the planet, including marine, terrestrial and freshwater realms. Spatial grain size and extent vary across studies depending on sampling methodology. We recommend gridding of sampling locations into areas of consistent size.Time Period and GrainThe earliest time series in BioTIME start in 1874, and the most recent records are from 2023. Temporal grain and duration vary across studies. We recommend doing sample-level rarefaction to ensure consistent sampling effort through time before calculating any diversity metric.Major Taxa and Level of MeasurementThe database includes any eukaryotic taxa, with a combined total of 56,400 taxa.Software Formatcsv and. SQL.

The historic libraries of Austria are often elegant classical spaces. The collections are sensitive to damage by insects, such as silverfish (Lepismatidae), biscuit beetles (Stegobium paniceum), spider beetle (Ptinus fur) and the furniture beetle (Anobium punctatum) and a range of other beetles e.g. Dermestidae, which attack carpets and museum objects. Warmer conditions and changes in humidity might encourage new species to appear at these locations. Historic libraries represent a useful group to study, because they have similar collections, with only limited addition of new material and sometimes very few visitors, thus representing a stable indoor ecosystem. The five monastic libraries in the study occupy a range of settings, from rural to urban. Additionally, there were three research libraries in Vienna. Insects were caught over several years (up to 10) from the eastern parts of Austria using sticky blunder and pheromone (webbing clothes moth) traps. Higher annual catch rates were found in more rural monastic settings and revealed a less even spread of species (a high Gini coefficient) than at urban sites. The Shannon diversity was higher in the urban research libraries. Species within the same family can show differences in preference: silverfish Lepisma saccharinum (rural), Ctenolepisma longicaudatum (urban) or C. calvum (urban), carpet beetles Anthrenus museorum (rural) and A. verbasci (urban). The differences may be a function of the land use, climate, air pollution or human activities. The work suggests that managing insects in these libraries need to account for differences between rural and urban locations.

In late summer of 2023 bed bug (Cimex lectularius) infestations received much media attention especially from Paris Fashion Week (2023-09-25/2023-10-03). Concern in France has grown in recent years and the public may have been sensitised from the recent release of the report Les punaises de lit: impacts, prévention et lutte from the Agence Nationale de Sécurité Sanitaire. Additionally, families returning from summer travel for the start of the school year (2023-09-04) may have brought Cimex spp. with them. A belief, typically false, that they are associated with poor housekeeping and the commercial sensitivity of infestations makes quantitative data on the occurrence and frequency of the insects difficult to find. Often it was based on the number of consultations with physicians and enquiries about bed bugs. Our study has used Google search frequency (Google Trends) to assess the growth and spread of public interest. It found that concern over the Paris outbreak spread to neighbouring countries and was an inverse function of distance. Health issues are a popular topic in science journalism and articles with bad news, threat, continuity and geographic proximity helped generate considerable media activity such that the public perceptions of the problem were enhanced and suggests that government agencies need to collect well standardised data on bed bug occurrence. Google Trends proved a sensitive tool to follow the public concern over an insect that invokes considerable dread.

Springtails (Collembola) inhabit soils from the Arctic to the Antarctic and comprise an estimated ~32% of all terrestrial arthropods on Earth. Here, we present a global, spatially-explicit database on springtail communities that includes 249,912 occurrences from 44,999 samples and 2,990 sites. These data are mainly raw sample-level records at the species level collected predominantly from private archives of the authors that were quality-controlled and taxonomically-standardised. Despite covering all continents, most of the sample-level data come from the European continent (82.5% of all samples) and represent four habitats: woodlands (57.4%), grasslands (14.0%), agrosystems (13.7%) and scrublands (9.0%). We included sampling by soil layers, and across seasons and years, representing temporal and spatial within-site variation in springtail communities. We also provided data use and sharing guidelines and R code to facilitate the use of the database by other researchers. This data paper describes a static version of the database at the publication date, but the database will be further expanded to include underrepresented regions and linked with trait data.

Insects can damage museum collections. Heritage organisations are increasingly alert to such risk, so have moved towards integrated pest management which sees monitoring as important to conservation strategies. Museum insects are usually monitored using sticky traps, although the records these provide are not always easy to interpret or analyse, so scoring methods, pest occurrence indices and zone systems have been used to use the observations to manage pests. A six-year trapping programme at almost 700 sites (i.e. traps) across six floors of a large museum in Austria provided a total catch of similar to 30 0 0 0 arthropods. Catch rate (catch per trap) was higher on lower floors although there was a substantial year-to-year variation. In addition to blunder traps, a proportion using pheromones as an attractant were effective at catching T. bisselliella . The pheromone is not attractive to silverfish ( Zygentoma ) yet the shy insects appear to take cover in the pheromone traps. In contrast Attagenus spp. were caught at equal rates on both pheromone and blunder traps. The study examined what factors influence the catch of insects in traps. The overall catch in a room is proportional to the number of traps set out. Catch increases with the size of the room, but this may arise because the number of traps is also related to room size. More specifically catch seems proportional to square root of room area, suggesting it relates to its perimeter. Infestations are revealed by high catch rate, maximum catches on a set of traps and the proportion of traps that are active in catching insects. The study aims to assess which parameters that might assist in identifying infested locations in museums. (c) 2023 Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR). Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.

Fungi have always posed an unquestionable threat to heritage collections worldwide. Now, in a future of climate change, biological risk factors may have to be considered even more than before. Models and simulations to assess possible impacts a changing outdoor climate will have on indoor environments and, in turn, on biodeterioration are still underdeveloped and require a more substantial data basis. This study aimed at filling some of these knowledge gaps through a broad-based approach combining microclimatic and microbiological monitoring in four historic libraries in Austria with an uncontrolled indoor climate: Altenburg Abbey, Melk Abbey, Klosterneuburg Monastery and the Capuchin Monastery in Vienna. Data were generated from thermohygrometric sensors, cultivation-dependent air- and surface sampling and further surface dust sampling for cultivation-independent analyses. Results gave insights on the status quo of microbiological loads in the libraries and outdoor-indoor relationships. Influences of the geographic location and room-use on corresponding indoor fungal profiles were identified. Lower fungal diversities were found at the most rural site with the strongest climatic fluctuations and extreme values than in the most urban, sheltered library with a very stable climate. Further, the humidity-stabilizing potential of large collections of hygroscopic materials, such as books, was also examined. Implications for a sustainable approach to prevent future biodeterioration are discussed, supporting the long-term preservation of these valuable historic collections.

The skin beetle Reesa vespulae is regularly found beyond North America where it originated. The larvae cause considerable concern in museums, as they damage hides or furs in addition to being a special source of damage to collections of dried plants in herbaria or collections of insects and other zoological specimens. Reesa vespulae arrived in Europe in the mid-20th century and was associated mostly with stored food products, but over time, it has become recognised as a museum pest. Although it is still uncommon and may only be observed in a small fraction of museums, when the insect is found in large numbers, it can cause problems. Catches from blunder traps in Austrian museums and from an online database in the UK were used to track changing concern over the insect. As a single female beetle can continue to reproduce because the species is parthenogenetic, its presence can persist over long periods of time. Although small populations in museums are typically found in the adult form, the larval forms are more common where a site is infested by high numbers, perhaps because the larvae and adults must range more widely for food. Although R. vespulae can be controlled using pesticides, it is also possible to kill the larvae within infested materials through freezing or anoxia.

This paper introduces a new method for identifying museum pests through the analysis of DNA present in settled dust. Traditionally, the identification of pests in cultural institutions such as museums and depositories has relied on insect trapping (monitoring). They give good results but need time (minimum spring until summer of one year for a complete survey) and face challenges related to the identification of small, rare, or damaged species. Our study presents a non-invasive approach that utilizes metabarcoding analysis of dust samples to identify pests and other arthropods at the species level. We collected dust samples with a handheld vacuum cleaner in summer 2023 from the six different floors of the Natural History Museum in Vienna and compared the results with the insect monitoring. We found over 359 different species of arthropods in the museum and could show how the diversity increases with the elevation of the building floor. This method could be used for rapid and cost-effective screening of pests before monitoring. But the interpretation of results is sometimes difficult (for Lepismatidae, for example), and it cannot replace a continuous monitoring of pests with traps. This investigation might present the highest indoor animal biodiversity ever found in a single building.

Zurich’s Urban Pest Advisory Service (UPAS) aims to survey, control and reduce hazards posed by pests. Records submitted to the UPAS may not exactly correlate with abundance but can reveal patterns of change. These reflect changes in species, public and media perceptions and the effects of climate and COVID-19, along with the effectiveness of new pest controls. Records for Blattodea and Plodia interpunctella declined in the period 1990–2022, while Cimex lectularius and Psocoptera increased. Summer has typically revealed the largest number of insects reported and Google searches show parallel seasonal variations. The Blattodea declined five-fold over time, likely due to better pest control methods (gel baits). Aedes albopictus, though rare, was the subject of media reports and awareness campaigns, which resulted in much public interest. Vespidae are abundant and have been reported in sufficient numbers to warrant an analysis of seasonal records, suggesting that July temperatures affect numbers. COVID-19 restrictions led to more frequent reports of rodents, pigeons, Zygentoma and Stegobium paniceum. The long-term reporting to the UPAS gives a useful indication of the changing concerns about pests in Zurich.

The webbing clothes moth (Tineola bisselliella) causes extensive and costly damage to fabrics, furnishings, and museum objects. It is best known from its presence in homes, museums, and historic properties, while infestations in office buildings are not as well understood. Offices typically have more frequent cleaning, fewer quiet habitats, less food availability, and fewer breeding environments for moths, which may explain the lower abundance. Nevertheless, they can be introduced with materials or by employees whose homes have a moth infestation. This study examines the distribution of different insect pests determined from pheromone traps set out in an unoccupied multi-floor office building in Switzerland. Tineola bisselliella dominated the insect catch but was mostly found in the aisles on the lower floors. The larger rooms tended to have a greater insect catch. Carpet beetles (Attagenus smirnovi) and silverfish (Zygentoma) were also found, although in smaller numbers, and often preferred the basement floors. The ghost silverfish (Ctenolepisma calvum) dominated the Zygentoma, even though it has been rare until recently in Switzerland. The study suggests the need for Integrated Pest Management within office buildings. In addition, in unoccupied buildings under renovation, with no obvious sources of food, insect pests still need monitoring.

Zusammenfassung Schädlingsprävention und -bekämpfung (IPM) ist ein Teil der präventiven Konservierung, und auch in Bibliotheken und Archiven ist der Schutz der Objekte und Materialien vor einem Befall und Schaden durch Insekten, Schimmel und Nager eine wichtige Maßnahme, um die Sammlung für zukünftige Generationen zu erhalten. In diesem Beitrag wird auf die wichtigsten Bestandteile des IPM-Konzeptes eingegangen, dazu gehören ein Monitoring, Quarantäne, eine gute Reinigung, Abdichtung des Gebäudes, eine Schulung der Mitarbeitenden, möglichst giftfreie Bekämpfungsmethoden und ein möglichst kühles Innenklima. Letzteres wird durch den Klimawandel schon jetzt beeinflusst, und in der Zukunft können höhere Temperaturen, Starkregenereignisse und neue eingeschleppte Schädlinge neue Herausforderungen für Bibliotheken und Archive sein. Besonders historische Bibliotheken, ohne ein reguliertes Innenklima, stehen vor großen Herausforderungen, und neue Arten wie das Papierfischchen haben in den letzten Jahren schon zu vielen Problemen geführt. Neue Methoden in der Bekämpfung, aber auch Detektion werden vorgestellt.

Soil life supports the functioning and biodiversity of terrestrial ecosystems. Springtails (Collembola) are among the most abundant soil arthropods regulating soil fertility and flow of energy through above- and belowground food webs. However, the global distribution of springtail diversity and density, and how these relate to energy fluxes remains unknown. Here, using a global dataset representing 2470 sites, we estimate the total soil springtail biomass at 27.5 megatons carbon, which is threefold higher than wild terrestrial vertebrates, and record peak densities up to 2 million individuals per square meter in the tundra. Despite a 20-fold biomass difference between the tundra and the tropics, springtail energy use (community metabolism) remains similar across the latitudinal gradient, owing to the changes in temperature with latitude. Neither springtail density nor community metabolism is predicted by local species richness, which is high in the tropics, but comparably high in some temperate forests and even tundra. Changes in springtail activity may emerge from latitudinal gradients in temperature, predation and resource limitation in soil communities. Contrasting relationships of biomass, diversity and activity of springtail communities with temperature suggest that climate warming will alter fundamental soil biodiversity metrics in different directions, potentially restructuring terrestrial food webs and affecting soil functioning.

The problem of bristletail Ctenolepisma longicaudatum (Zygentoma: Lepismatidae) in libraries, archives, and museums is increasing. It can cause damage to valuable and irreplaceable objects. We describe the effect of the use of insecticidal gel bait (active ingredient: indoxacarb) against C. longicaudatum popula-tions in three libraries, seven archives, and seven museums in Norway and Austria. Pest activity was mon-itored with sticky traps to evaluate the effect of bait application. Significant declines in pest populations were observed at all locations when small bait droplets were applied either systematically throughout the buildings or strategically close to suspected aggregations. In addition, bait was successfully used to pre-vent infestation in a new museum building. The cost of treatment, measured by the amount of bait and work hours spent, was low, and bait application was conducted by either the professional pest control technicians or the local integrated pest management (IPM) manager. The use of insecticidal gel bait and its secondary effects is a cost-efficient alternative for population decimation; moreover, the method has a low probability of negative health issues for employees at the treated localities or damage to the ob-jects. The application of bait is discussed in relation to its alignment with other IPM methods in libraries, archives, and museums.(c) 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS on behalf of Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR).This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )

Viticulture is a perennial cropping system that provides large inter-row space as a non-crop habitat for a range of different taxa. Extensive vegetation management has been shown to increase biodiversity and ecosystem service provision in vineyards. Important soil ecosystem services are decomposition, nutrient cycling, and pest regulation provided by the mesofauna (e.g., Acari and Collembola). However, studies investigating the effects of inter-row management on soil mesofauna are scarce. We studied the effect of inter-row management intensity (complete vegetation cover, alternating vegetation cover, and bare ground) and local pedoclimatic conditions on Acari and Collembola in nine Austrian vineyards. Our results showed that the clay content of the soil was the most important factor and increased the abundances of both analyzed taxa. Complete and alternating vegetation cover increased their abundance in comparison to bare ground management. Higher soil respiration slightly contributed to higher abundances of those two taxa in both years. In conclusion, besides the positive effects of the clay content in the soil, complete and alternating vegetation cover are feasible management practices for increasing soil mesofauna in vineyards.

Separating soil-dwelling microarthropods from their substrate is a fundamental procedure in soil zoological research. Although the earliest methods to automatically extract animals from soil were described more than a century ago, the efficiency of existing techniques is still open to debate. In this study, we mutually compared the performance of four methods of very different operation mode (active and passive extraction, and traps) to inspect for biases of either method. From a temperate grassland and a forest site, we collected the adult oribatid and collembolan fauna using a Tullgren extractor, a Macfadyen canister extractor, heptane flotation and pitfall traps. Between Tullgren and Macfadyen, we did not find substantial differences in group and species abundances, rarified species richness, body length distributions, and collembolan life form. Heptane flotation produced fewer individuals than the two active methods, but comparable patterns of species composition, body lengths and collembolan life form. Pitfall traps strongly underestimated abundance and species richness of Oribatida and of eu- and hemiedaphic Collembola, but caught high numbers of epedaphic individuals, and several epedaphic species that were missed by the other methods. In conclusion, our data indicated that the relative efficiency of the Tullgren and Macfadyen methods was high and estimates of abundance and species richness reliable. We suggest to complement the traditional soil coring with pitfall trapping to adequately represent the epedaphic collembolan species in the data.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to significant changes in societies across the globe. In many countries in Europe, national lockdowns during the spring of 2020 meant that museums were closed, and maintenance and housekeeping were at a minimum. We compared the insect monitoring data of 15 museums in and around Vienna between the years 2018 and 2022 to see potential effects of the two lockdowns (spring 2020 and winter 2020/21) on insect populations. In Vienna, these changes altered the presence of pests, most notably an increase in silverfish by late spring (March–May 2020). We also found increased numbers of other pest species (notably Tineola bisselliella and Attagenus sp.), though these changes were seen later (June–October 2020). Thylodrias contractus, although found only in one museum, appeared to show decreased numbers during 2020. Storage areas in some of the museums revealed no significant increase in insect catch during the COVID-19 related closures. Since there are rarely visitors in such spaces, the situation did not change much during the closures. Silverfish are shy insects, but they were able to range more freely during the closures in the mostly darkened rooms. The increase of Tineola bisselliella and Attagenus sp. could be a result of reduced cleaning in the first lockdown. In the second lockdown, no significant changes were found. Human activity from staff was much higher compared to the first closure; a second reason could be the time of year, as in the winter period, it is mainly larvae that are active. Increased insect populations remind us that even when museums are unoccupied, they still need monitoring for possible risks from pests. No damage to the objects from the pests was observed in the museums investigated.