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A new study published Wednesday, revealing populations of flying insects like bees and butterflies plunged more than 75 percent in German nature preserves over the past 27 years, has scientists calling for further research into probable causes such as climate change and pesticide use, and raising alarms about a potential “ecological Armageddon.”

“We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon. On current trajectory, our grandchildren will inherit a profoundly impoverished world.”
—Dave Goulson, report co-author

“Insects make up about two thirds of all life on Earth,” noted report co-author Dave Goulson, a professor at Sussex University in the United Kingdom.

“We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon,” he said. “On current trajectory, our grandchildren will inherit a profoundly impoverished world.”

Goulson was part of a team of European scientists who studied population levels in 63 nature reserves across Germany from 1989 to 2016 by setting up malaise traps that captured more than 1,500 samples of flying insects.

They tracked the rapid decline across 96 unique location-year combinations in Germany, which is “representative of Western European low-altitude nature protection areas embedded in a human-dominated landscape,” as they wrote in the peer-reviewed study, published in the journal PLOS ONE.

“This is the first study that looked into the total biomass of flying insects and it confirms our worries,” co-author Caspar Hallmann, from the Radboud University in The Netherlands, told BBC. “This confirms what everybody’s been having as a gut feeling.”

“The fact that flying insects are decreasing at such a high rate in such a large area is an alarming discovery,” said project leader Hans de Kroon, also from Radboud University. “As entire ecosystems are dependent on insects for food and as pollinators, it places the decline of insect eating birds and mammals in a new context. We can barely imagine what would happen if this downward trend continues unabated.”