Minimizing insecticide use, preventing vector diseases and facilitating biodiversity assessments are suitable applications of recent advances in photonic insect surveillance and entomological lidar. The tools also comprise a new window into fundamental aspect of the fascinating life and ecology of insects and their predators in situ. At the same time, it is evident that lidars are subject to finite detection range given by the instrument noise and saturation levels, and therefore, intervals of

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... he biomass spectra are sectioned at different ranges. The Scheimpflug lidar allows an interesting trade-off between high sample rate and low pulse energy for retrieving wing beat harmonics and slow sample rates with high pulse energy for detecting small species far away. In this paper, we review and revise calibration, sizing and associated deficiencies, and report count rates to 10 4 insects/minute up to 2 km range. We investigate if and how high dynamic range can be exploited in entomological lidar and also how fast and slow sample rates could complement each other and capture a wider span of the biomass spectrum. We demonstrate that smaller insect can be detected further away by long exposures and show consistency between the captured biomass size spectra. However, we find unexpected discrepancies between short and long exposures in the range distributions. We found that vertebrates as well as specular insects can saturate signals. Error sources and limitations are elaborated on.