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Reliable baseline data are essential for setting defensible restoration targets, prioritizing interventions, and demonstrating ecological recovery. However, comprehensive biodiversity inventories can be costly, seasonally constrained, and difficult to repeat at the frequency needed for adaptive management. Terrestrial Rapid Bioassessment (TRBA) is a proprietary PKB Engineering tool designed to provide a rapid, repeatable, and fieldpractical assessment of terrestrial ecological condition while establishing a quantitative basis for tracking project performance over time. The method uses nocturnal moth communities as proxies for ecological stress, biodiversity, food-web energetics, and habitat integrity. Moths are especially well suited to this role because of their high local diversity, strong associations with vegetation and host plants, varied life history traits, importance as prey, and sensitivity to environmental change. Their community composition can therefore reveal ecological patterns that may not be apparent through vegetation observations alone.

TRBA employs a full-spectrum light source, portable power supply, standardized field procedures, and high-quality macro-photography equipment to attract and document moths under nighttime field conditions. Surveys can be deployed with a relatively small equipment footprint and adapted to site access, project schedules, and monitoring objectives. Photographic records support species identification and create a reviewable dataset without requiring broad specimen collection. Recorded taxa are evaluated through a biostatistical scoring process that considers their ecological value and contribution to the observed assemblage. These values are then integrated into a site-level habitat score that places the surveyed landform along a condition continuum ranging from severely impaired to minimally disturbed or reference-like. The resulting score is intended to complement, rather than replace, conventional information on vegetation, hydrology, soils, landscape context, and known stressors.

This presentation describes the ecological rationale for selecting moths as indicators, outline field deployment and photographic documentation, and show how species-level observations are translated into an interpretable measure of habitat condition. Examples illustrate the ecological traits and functions represented by selected moth species and explain how assemblage-level patterns can inform restoration planning. The session also address survey timing, weather, seasonality, repeatability, and the importance of consistent protocols when comparing sites or monitoring change. Potential applications include land-trust due diligence and acquisition planning, corporate habitat-restoration initiatives, compensatory mitigation, wetland mitigation banking, post-construction monitoring, and long-term stewardship. TRBA may also help practitioners identify locations that warrant more intensive study, compare alternative management areas, and communicate ecological condition to clients, regulators, funders, and community partners.

By establishing defensible baseline conditions and enabling consistent reassessment, TRBA supports standards-based restoration planning in which measurable indicators are used to evaluate movement toward a reference condition. Attendees will leave with a practical understanding of the method’s strengths, appropriate uses, and boundaries; the information needed to design a repeatable survey; and ways to incorporate moth-based evidence into broader ecological decision-making. The presentation will demonstrate how a focused biological indicator can strengthen baseline characterization, guide restoration priorities, evaluate management effectiveness, and document incremental progress toward desired ecosystem outcomes while remaining feasible for real-world project budgets and timelines.

Blaine Rothauser is Senior Project Manager and Senior Ecologist for PKB Engineering. He heads the Ecological and Land Use Practice Division and supports various bridge and highway engineering projects with land use regulation permits and ecological mitigation. His expertise includes sensitive landscapes and their many threatened, endangered, and special concern species as they pertain to permitting and compliance with NJDEP Highlands, Pinelands, and Freshwater Protection Wetland Act Regulations as well as the Army Corps of Engineers.