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Climate change is a key driver of increased wildfire activity globally. Whilst the recovery of plant communities after fire is generally understood, the impacts on ecological processes, such as pollen transport by insects, have received little attention. We investigated the effects of wildfire on diurnal insects and pollen transport over 2 years following a large fire in Southern Portugal. By comparing samples collected at burned and adjacent unburned sites, we examined wildfire effects on (a) abundance and species richness of insects across seasons, (b) pollen being transported, (c) three of the most abundant species: Oxythyrea funesta, Heliothaurus ruficolis (both Coleoptera), and Apis mellifera (Hymenoptera). Wildfire and season had significant, interacting effects on the abundance of insects but not species richness. Abundance and species richness increased over time at both burned and unburned sites, most notably each spring. Pollen loads, and species richness, found on individual insects were significantly higher in burned sites in the first spring only, but generally increased with time after the wildfire. The abundance of O. funesta was similar between burned and unburned sites in the spring, but in the winter was significantly higher in burned sites; there were no significant differences in summer and autumn. H. ruficolis abundance was higher in burned sites. A. mellifera abundance was unaffected. Overall, across almost all the community metrics, our results suggest that wildfire affects pollen transport by diurnal insects, at least in the short term, but with time, these become similar to unburned habitats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trends in insect abundance are well established in some datasets, but far less is known about how abundance measures translate into biomass trends. Moths (Lepidoptera) provide particularly good opportunities to study trends and drivers of biomass change at large spatial and temporal scales, given the existence of long‐term abundance datasets. However, data on the body masses of moths are required for these analyses, but such data do not currently exist.To address this data gap, we collected empirical data in 2018 on the forewing length and dry mass of field‐sampled moths, and used these to train and test a statistical model that predicts the body mass of moth species from their forewing lengths (with refined parameters for Crambidae, Erebidae, Geometridae and Noctuidae).Modeled biomass was positively correlated, with high explanatory power, with measured biomass of moth species (R2 = 0.886 ± 0.0006, across 10,000 bootstrapped replicates) and of mixed‐species samples of moths (R2 = 0.873 ± 0.0003), showing that it is possible to predict biomass to an informative level of accuracy, and prediction error was smaller with larger sample sizes.Our model allows biomass to be estimated for historical moth abundance datasets, and so our approach will create opportunities to investigate trends and drivers of insect biomass change over long timescales and broad geographic regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]