How does it work?
Insect Surveillance intends to push the insect monitoring process to unprecedented levels of information extraction regarding the presence, time-stamping detection events, species' identification and population density of targeted insect pests:
- We endow typical, low-cost plastic traps for a large number of insect pests with the necessary optoelectronic sensors to guard the entrance of the trap in order to detect, time-stamp, GPS tag, and - in relevant cases - identify the species of the incoming insect from their wingbeat.
- Insect counts as well as environmental parameters that correlate with insect's population development are wirelessly transmitted to the central monitoring agency in real time, are visualized and streamed to statistical methods to assist enforcement of security control to insect pests.
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Pest monitoring for your crops
Farmers rarely have the extent and quality of information needed to make timely decisions on treatments because their knowledge on when and where the infestation exactly starts, what is the state of the current situation and what was the effect of an applied treatment is based on manual inspection of monitoring traps deployed on a limited spatial and temporal scale.
Inspectors performing visual identification and counting are not always experts, confident to make reliable identification and the protocols they need to follow result into compromises.
Manual inspection of traps shows considerable heterogeneity in geographic and temporal coverage. Since inspection of insect traps, is concentrated in a few sites, this highly aggregated distribution of information, limits our ability to understand the large-scale dynamic of the phenomenon and to benefit from its knowledge.
We have embedded our electronics in traps monitoring population of insect pests of olive, cotton, grapes, fruit trees, stored cereals and pulses, pine trees and palm plantations. Mosquitoes and bees as well.
From both a conceptual and management perspective, there is an urgent need to increase the information flow from the field-traps straight to a central monitoring agency over large areas and through time as well as to visualize and summarize this flow in a statistically reliable sense.
To this end, we develop technologies to improve, expand and automate global monitoring of insects of economic importance to thousands of nodes around the world.