Does insect trapping truly measure insect populations?

Abstract The measurement process has a well‐known structure and requires tools with proper characteristics, depending on the physical quantities and their magnitude. While most fields of research have reliable tools to support the experiments, this is not properly the case for measurements in the population dynamics of insects and animals, more in general. Monitoring insect species is a common practice in agriculture and forest environments, above all to develop pest control or biodiversity conservation strategies and to validate or feed decision support system tools. Besides the development of several monitoring techniques, an explicit connection between entomology and metrology (the science of measurements) is still missing. We may ask if the current tools involved in monitoring insect populations, as traps for instance, respect the standard features that measurement tools should have, and if they provide ‘proper measurements’ or just an ‘estimation’. This work analyses the pros and cons of insect trapping by connecting metrology and entomology and provides some perspectives on which the research communities should focus and interact to answer the questions still open.