A five-year multidisciplinary study sponsored by the U.S. Forest Service and conducted in southern Ohio (Vinton and Lawrence Counties) demonstrated that prescribed burning in early spring had no significant impact on moth communities of mixed-oak forest. Subsets of the data were used to test whether particular guilds (e.g. leaf-litter feeders) might be impacted by burning and again no significant impact was detected. We suggest that the unevenness of the fires, their moderate temperature and relatively small area (80 ha. within a 6000 ha. forest) allowed moths to quickly recolonize burned plots. The data from this project were compared with samples taken with the identical protocol in an isolated 300 ha. suburban forest fragment immediately north of Columbus. Compared to the plots in the burn study, the moth fauna of the forest fragment was depauperate. We suggest that this is a result of isolation, artificial lighting in surrounding developed areas the park, and perhaps deer overgrazing on understory vegetation.