Insects are experiencing global declines, driven in part by the intensification of conventional agriculture. As a result, there is an urgent need for rapid, effective, and practical tools to monitor insect biodiversity within agricultural fields– tools that can assess ecosystem health, detect population trends, and evaluate the impact of regenerative and conservation practices. Passive acoustic monitoring has proven useful in wildlife monitoring, but it has rarely been applied to insect biodiversity, particularly in agroecosystems. This limited application is partly due to the overwhelming volume of data generated and a lack of standardized protocols for recorder deployment that balance ecological insight with feasibility. To address this gap, we deployed Song Meter Mini acoustic recorders across nine large-scale commercial agricultural fields (>100 acres) in the Midwest during the 2024 growing season (June–October). We calculated Bioacoustic Index values and assessed how their standard error changed with varying recording lengths to identify an optimal balance between collecting sufficient ecological information and minimizing the time, labor, and data-processing demands of large-scale insect monitoring. These findings provide practical guidance for scalable acoustic monitoring of insect biodiversity in agricultural landscapes.
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