A broader flight season for Norway’s Odonata across a century and a half

As global climate continues to change, so too will phenology of a wide range of insects. Changes in flight season usually are characterised as shifts to earlier dates or means, with attention less often paid to flight season breadth or whether seasons are now skewed. We amassed flight season data for the insect order Odonata, the dragonflies and damselflies, for Norway over the past century-and-a-half to examine the form of flight season change. By means of Bayesian analyses that incorporated uncertainty relative to annual variability in survey effort, we estimated shifts in flight season mean, breadth, and skew. We focussed on flight season breadth, positing that it will track documented growing season expansion. A specific mechanism explored was shifts in voltinism, the number of generations per year, which tends to increase with warming. We found strong evidence for an increase in  flight season breadth but much less for a shift in mean, with any shift of the latter tending toward a ..., Data was extracted from Artsdatabanken, a public database for Norway.  Data were cleaned, and useable records served as the basis for analyses., Excel.