![]() It is standardized, non‐lethal, and does not alter the substrate or require frequent visits. The time‐lapse camera method effectively samples litter arthropods to collect long‐term data. Pitfall trap is inefficient in capturing either the ground dwelling sedentary terrestrial arthropods or those which disseminate by flying and do not perform as well as quadrat extraction methods in sampling terrestrial arthropods from forest ecosystems with a well-developed litter layer ( Fisher 1999 Woodcock 2005 ). Hymenoptera (ants), Embioptera (webspinners), and Blattodea (cockroaches) frequently escaped from pitfalls so were particularly under‐sampled by them. Cameras programed with 1‐ or 15‐min intervals recorded around twice as many arthropod taxa per day and a third more individuals per day than pitfall traps. We tested the effectiveness of these time‐lapse cameras, and quantified escape and avoidance behavior of arthropod orders encountering pitfall traps by placing cameras programed with a range of sampling intervals above pitfalls, to assess numerical, taxonomic, and body size differences in samples collected by the two methods. A total of 419 insect species were found, 329 of which were exclusively recovered from the Malaise traps. We test an alternative sampling method that can be left in place for several months at a time: verticallyplaced time‐lapse camera traps that have a short focal distance, enabling identification of small arthropods. The arthropod class ‘Insecta’ accounted for the highest proportion of detected species. Pitfall trapping is not ideal for long‐term sampling because it is lethal, labor‐intensive, and may have taxonomic sampling biases. Pitfall trapping is the standard technique to estimate activity and relative abundance of leaf litter arthropods.
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