Germany is a hotspot for dragonflies and damselflies (Odonata) species in Europe, owing to the range of habitats and climates that it provides. While many recent and mostly small-scale studies suggest long-term declines of insect populations in different parts of Europe, studies of freshwater insects—including dragonflies and damselflies—suggest that some species have increased in occurrence. Researchers of iDiv, FSU and UFZ have now provided a nationwide analysis of the occurrence and distribution of dragonflies and damselflies in Germany between 1980 and 2016. For this, they analyzed over 1 million occurrence records on 77 species from different regional databases, most of which were collected by citizen scientists and collated by the natural history society of German-speaking odonatologists (GdO).