Insights from synthetic star-forming regions. III.

We test the accuracy of commonly used techniques and construct new methods to extract the SFR, so that these findings can be applied to measure the SFR in real regions throughout the Milky Way.

We investigate diffuse infrared SFR tracers such as those using 24{mu}m, 70{mu}m and total infrared emission, which have been previously calibrated for global galaxy scales. We set up a toy model of a galaxy and show that the infrared emission is consistent with the intrinsic SFR using extra-galactic calibrated laws (although the consistency does not prove their reliability). For local scales, we show that these techniques produce completely unreliable results for single star-forming regions, which are governed by different characteristic timescales.