‘I have seen the decline’: pesticides linked to falling UK insect numbers

Experts say invertebrates are exposed to range of chemicals, some of which are 10,000 times more toxic than DDT

• What are highly hazardous pesticides and how are they used in the UK?

Prof Lynn Dicks has had her hands in the soil for almost three decades - and she has watched it slowly become stripped of invertebrate life.

In my life, I have seen the decline," says Dicks, an ecology professor at the University of Cambridge. She knows it from the data: The data we have of long-term trends in insect abundance over time, that the decline rates are, on average, about 1% a year.