A review of extensive variation in the design of pitfall traps and a proposal for a standard pitfall trap design for monitoring ground-active arthropod biodiversity.

ABSTRACT: To understand change in global biodiversity patterns requires large-scale, long-term monitoring. The ability to draw meaningful comparison across studies is severely hampered by extensive variation in the design of the sampling equipment and how it is used. Here, we present a meta-analysis and description highlighting this variation in a common, widely used entomological survey technique. We report a decline in the completeness of methodological reporting over a 20-year period, while there has been no clear reduction in the methodological variation between researchers using pitfall traps for arthropod sampling. There is a growing need for improved comparability between studies to facilitate the generation of large-scale, long-term biodiversity datasets. However, our results show that, coun

SUBMITTER: Brown GR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4867678 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature