JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
One way that scientists track climate change is by watching for changes in insect populations. Insects can be especially sensitive to temperature. But there's some very basic knowledge about insects that scientists still don't have, so they're getting help from volunteers. Yellowstone Public Radio's Kayla Desroches reports from Billings, Mont.
KAYLA DESROCHES, BYLINE: At about 10 o'clock on a recent Friday night, entomologist Marian Kirst leads more than a dozen volunteers trudging down a hill. They're in the sandstone bluffs around the Yellowstone River, just outside Billings, near train tracks and Interstate 90.
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DESROCHES: Nestled in this ravine are buckets mounted with planes of plexiglass and light bulbs, set up earlier. Kirst, with the Montana non-profit Northern Rockies Research and Educational Services, stops at one and crouches down to see what moths are fluttering around it.
MARIAN KIRST: Who's this little guy? Look at this. Look at the face on this little cutie. Oh, hello.
DESROCHES: The lights confuse the moths, and the plexiglass knocks them down into a funnel.
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DESROCHES: In the bucket, poison kills the moths. In the morning, Kirst and her citizen scientists can sort, freeze and mail the specimens to Colorado.
KIRST: In order to do any kind of future research on climate, on pesticide use, on how human impact, in different ways, is affecting moth populations, you have to have a baseline of diversity to work from.
DESROCHES: This mothing effort will help comprehensively document specifically what kinds of moths are in Montana and help collect the data for future climate-change studies. Kirst says Montana was a blank for many moth species when this project kicked off in 2020. Hobby scientists in rural areas are important, she says. Montana is the country's fourth-largest state, but its population is only around a million, so it's not necessarily easy to find people to help them locate, trap and catalog insects.
KIRST: And these guys get to be a part of it. That's what's so neat.
DESROCHES: The Moth Project is a collaboration with Chuck Harp, collections manager at Colorado State University's C.P. Gillette Museum of Arthropod Diversity. He says Montana volunteers helped establish an initial sampling of what moth species are in the state and discovered entirely new ones.
CHUCK HARP: You don't know what you lose if you don't know what was there in the first place.
HARP: Harp says this project is part of a bigger effort to catalog insects across the Rocky Mountain West and Southwestern U.S. Biologist Mat Seidensticker, with Northern Rockies Research and Educational Services, leads the statewide efforts and says they want to tap citizen scientists more going forward.
MAT SEIDENSTICKER: That's huge because what they're doing is they're - we call it gap-fillers, right? - 'cause each one of these counties is so big, you know? And so it's like, the more sites that we can get to, it just helps us fill in those gaps of that distribution of data.
DESROCHES: Back in Billings, volunteer Rebecca Newton, who's a biologist with the Bureau of Land Management, holds a glass jar and a lid, ready to catch a moth bumping against a standing light.
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REBECCA NEWTON: This one's got really cool patterns on it.
DESROCHES: Newton says this is valuable data for land managers to use when they analyze impacts to public lands, but it's also just fun.
NEWTON: The more you look, the more you see, the more curious you become, and it just opens up this whole world of exploration. Like, it renews that curiosity of the natural world in a really fulfilling way.
DESROCHES: So far, the group has collected samples in each of Montana's 56 counties. Its goal is to document moths at a minimum of two sites in each, at different times of year.
For NPR News, I'm Kayla Desroches in Billings, Mont.
(SOUNDBITE OF MORGAN WALLEN SONG, "LAST NIGHT") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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