This first issue of Austral Ecology for 2022 (Volume 47) highlights some of the exciting and influential insect ecology research that Austral Ecology and the Ecological Society of Australia is supporting. At the annual Ecological Society of Australia conference held in November 2019, Brisbane, Australia, an insect ecology workshop was held to highlight the research priorities for insect ecology into the future. From that workshop, the identification of publication trends research paper was initiated and the process of developing the special issue was devised, with the development of the review paper leading this issue(Andrew et al. 2022). Structural topic modelling was used to assess the research trends in over 34 000 papers and identified how insect-related research is immersed within the broader ecological discipline.