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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects / Feed

Camera trapping for insects is becoming a reality using advances in camera, AI, and autonomous systems technologies. This group discusses the latest advances, shares experiences, and offers a space for anyone interested in the technology, from beginners to experts.

Group curators

Tom August
Computational ecologist with interests in computer vision, citizen science, open science, drones, acoustics, data viz, software engineering, public engagement
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discussion

Capture And Identify Flying Insects

Simon Gut

30 December 2022 7:34pm

Hello EveryoneI already found a lot of helpful information on this page though I am having a hard time finding a system which is confirmed to be able to identify insects that fly...

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Tom August

3 January 2023 1:55pm

This sounds like an interesting challenge. I think depth of focus and shutter speeds are going to be challenging. You'll need a fast shutter speed to be able to get shape images of insects in flight. Are you interested in species ID or are you more interested in abundance. having a backboard on the other side of the hotel would be a good idea to remove background clutter from your images.

Emma Campbell

19 May 2023 8:18am

Hi there,

I am also trying to get some visuals from wildlife cameras of insects visiting insect hotels. Was wondering if you had gained any further information on which cameras might be used for testing this?

 

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discussion

What is the best light for attracting moths?

Tom August

17 October 2022 3:12pm

We want to upgrade the UV lights on our moth traps. We currently use a UV fluorescent tube, but we are thinking about moving to a LED setup, like the LepiLED or EntoLED. We think...

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Tom August

13 January 2023 12:33pm

We have also thought about these sorts of things. We have chosen to keep the light on continuously for the night, but turn it off before dawn to allow the moths to fly away before predators arrive. 

We are going to be trying out the EntoLEDs and LepiLEDs in Panama in the last two weeks of January, I'll post here on my thoughts.

Tom August

5 May 2023 4:59pm

Would be great to hear more. We found that the lepiLED was great! The ento mini did not attract as much, but if compensated with many nights of deployment it would probably work okay.

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discussion

Hack a momentary on-off button 

Andrew Quitmeyer

15 April 2023 9:21pm

I have several very bright UV LEDs that I bought for cheap online that are built into nice housings of UV curing lamps and flashlights that can already be automatically powered by...

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Rob Appleby

21 April 2023 2:30pm

 

 

Hi @hikinghack , 

If I am understanding correctly, you want to be able to have the UV lights come on and go off at a certain time (?) and emulate the button push which actually switches them on and off? Is the momentary switch the little button at the top of the image you attached? Is it going to be cotrolled by a timer or a microcontroller at all? Sorry for all the questions, but I am not 100% clear on exactly what you are after. In the meantime, I've linked to a pretty decent tutorial on the process of hacking a momentary switch with a view to automating it with an Arduino microcontroller board, although it sort of assumes a bit of knowledge of electronics (e.g. MOSFETS/transistors) in certain places.  

Alternatively, this tutorial is also good, with good explanations throughout:

If neither of these help, let me know and there might be some easier instructions I can put together. 

All the best,

Rob

Harold Tay

22 April 2023 3:04am

Hi Andrew,

If I understand you correctly, you want to turn on the LEDs when USB power is applied.  The easiest way I can see to do this is to reroute the red wire to USBC VBUS, via an appropriate current limiting resistor.  This bypasses all the electronics in your photo.

You could insert the current limiting resistor in the USB cable for better heat dissipation, or use a DC-DC constant current source instead of a resistor if power consumption is a concern.

Rob Appleby

22 April 2023 7:45am

Further to @htarold 's excellent suggestion, you can replace that entire PCB with a simple USB breakout board (e.g. USB micro attached below) by removing the red wire and attaching it to VCC on the breakout board, and removing and attaching the black wire to GND. 

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event

Camera traps, AI, and Ecology

Dimitri Korsch

14 April 2023 10:08am

3rd International Workshop in Jena, Germany (7. - 8. September 2023)

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Dimitri Korsch

1 September 2023 8:06am

Are you ready for the event next week!? 17 talks, 4 sessions, 4 invited speakers - check out the schedule if you want more information:...
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discussion

Who's going to ESA in Portland this year?

Tom August

31 March 2023 9:27am

So who is going to be at the Ecological Society of America meeting this year in Portland, August 6-11th?It will be my first time at the conference, so I won't know many people...

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Dan Morris

5 April 2023 11:58pm

Indeed, I'll be there too!  I like to meet new conservation friends with morning runs, so I will likely organize a couple of runs, maybe one right near the conference, and one somewhere in a nearby park where we can look for wildlife.  The latter would probably be at an obscenely early hour, so we can drive somewhere, ideally see elk (there are elk within 25 minutes of Portland!), and still get back in time for the morning sessions.

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discussion

Camera to follow wasps/attach on wasps

Shweta

9 March 2023 5:16am

I am researching on the nesting on potter wasps in Bangalore, India. I have to follow nesting wasps to observe all its activities including where it takes rest at night. I am...

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Shweta

11 March 2023 2:44am

Hi @Lars_Holst_Hansen  @tom_august 

The link to the video is amazing. Thank you for it. 

The wasps that I am working on, are solitary. So, basically it is just this one female that builds the entire nest. Like what you (@tom_august) mentioned, the best option would be to keep a running camera at the nest to record the whole process of nest building. Having one placed inside will be difficult because even if we do work out a way to have lighting inside the nest, the light might be detrimental to the developing larva inside. Hence, it is likely not to be of any benefit.

I am totally smitten by the idea of having a sensor on the wasp body to track where it goes! We could get to know how far it travels to bring the prey and also to collect soil. 

Tom August

14 March 2023 1:30pm

@ShwetaMukundan I just saw this thesis published on tracking bees. Maybe you could use the same method? 

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discussion

Exploring storage options for mass data collection

Adam Roberts

22 March 2023 3:20am

Hi all. I'm currently exploring options for data storage en masse. With our project we will be collecting 24hr hydrophone data, drone video 6hr per day, photography &...

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Carly Batist

22 March 2023 7:36pm

Hi Adam!

I mostly live within the ecoacoustics space so I'll just speak on the hydrophone part of your request; Arbimon is a free web/cloud-based platform with unlimited storage for audio files. We've got an uploader app as well for mass-uploading lots of files. There's also a bunch of spectrogram visualization/annotation tools and analysis workflows available. It's AWS running under the hood.

I have some experience working directly with AWS & Microsoft Azure, and I've found personally that AWS was more user-friendly and intuitive for the (fairly simplistic) kinds of tasks I've done.  

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discussion

Monitoring airborne biomass

Liechti Felix

14 March 2023 10:30am

We are producing hard- and software for small scale research  radars to monitor airborne biomass automatically. We can distinguish birds, bats and insects through day and...

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Tom August

14 March 2023 1:34pm

Looks like you want to have a read of this thread: 

Liechti Felix

20 March 2023 2:44pm

Our project in very short is, setting up a sensor network for monitoring airborne biomass, mainly insects, birds and bats in near realtime, and to develop a forecast model to be used for mitigation with respect various types of human-wildlife conflicts (e.g. wind power, pesticide application, aviation). Our expertise is mainly in radar monitoring, but we aim on add insect camera information to be merged with the quantitative biomass measeurments by radar.

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discussion

AMI-trap unboxing - Automated moth monitoring system

Tom August

1 December 2022 9:44am

Thanks so much to @JoeBowden for recording this video of his unboxing of the AMI-Trap (Automated Monitoring of Insects Trap). Joe and others in Canada, USA, UK and Denmark have...

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Tom August

20 February 2023 4:59pm

Here is the website where you can find more info about tue AMI trap.

https://www.ceh.ac.uk/ukceh-ami-trap-automated-monitoring-insects

Stephanie O'Donnell

20 February 2023 5:29pm

This video is so great - I don't know what I was imagining that you were building, but this is so much bigger and more involved than whatever I was vaguely thinking. Really cool to see! 

Side comment - could we make conservation tech unboxings a thing? 

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discussion

Solar panels in the tropics

Tom August

26 January 2023 12:28am

We are deploying automated systems in the topics and hope to use solar panels, but this closed canopy in most places I'm seeing this as a challenge.Past the obvious: 'find a...

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Harold Tay

27 January 2023 1:23pm

Hi Tom,

I'm with Akiba, you have to test.  A collaborator has deployed solar-augmented kit in secondary jungle and some of them got enough light, and others didn't, so it can work.  The open circuit voltage of solar panels doesn't change a whole lot in dim light, but the current drops drastically.  So you would choose an oversize panel of the same voltage (or a bit higher).

Thanks

Brett Muir

27 January 2023 3:56pm

I've been intrigued by this topic. Thinking about ways you could use drones or some kind of launcher to deploy panels above the canopy. Sadly I live in the great white north so I have no way of testing any concepts. Maybe even some kind of solar balloon that could float above the canopy. Interesting design problem.

Netty Cheruto

30 January 2023 10:10am

Hey Tom,
Since the output is dependent on a couple of factors such as the solar irradiance of the place, shading from the canopy, the type of solar panels (mono, poly or amorphous) and orientation of the panels, etc, I'd suggest you use a software to simulate the different parameters to get an almost accurate estimation of the output. You can try PVsyst- it has a free month trial (I haven't used it before but I hear it's great) or any other PV software :)

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discussion

Cameras - pros and cons

Tom August

21 September 2022 2:04pm

So, what makes a good camera for an autonomous camera trap for insects?We use a web camera in our system, which seems to work well a lot of the time, it produces...

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Maximilian Sittinger

23 November 2022 2:58pm

Hi Liz, unfortunately you will still need a Raspberry Pi as host for the OAK-1 camera to reproduce our hardware setup. It's also possible to use another Linux-based system (e.g. Raspberry Pi alternatives), but I didn't test this myself and the setup process will be different to our documentation (and probably not so straightforward). I'm planning to publish the documentation website in the next weeks, but I can already send you detailed information about putting together the hardware if you are still interested.

Hubert Szczygiel

7 December 2022 1:03am

Hello,

 

I'm working on a light weight light trap based on Bjerge et al 2021, however I opted to use an ArduCam 64mp (9152 x 6944 resolution). Designed for the pi specifically and at $60 it checks many of your criteria. I haven't put everything together yet so I can't speak for white balance and power usage, but the autofocus appears to work well from initial tests, and it is tiny.

 

Cheers,

Hubert

Tom August

8 December 2022 4:06pm

Awesome! it would be great to hear how you get on, maybe you can share your results here when you have them. Is the camera only for the Pi? That could be a problem for scaling as Pis are quite hard to come by at the moment.

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Link

Easy-RIDER project Workshop IV: Pollinator monitoring recording

Alba Gomez Segura

17 November 2022 2:39pm

In case you missed our webinar on Pollinator monitoring, here is the recording.

We had presentations from three teams who will be presenting their work in designing automated monitoring tools for flower-visiting insects, different ways for creating datasets for training machine learning algorithms for insect identification and how these new technologies can be integrated in traditional monitoring schemes. The talks were followed with a discussion session.

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discussion

Implementation of video surveillance to quantify the predation rate

Julien Peters

25 October 2022 4:26pm

Hello everyone,First of all, thank you for all the information on your great website. My name is Julien Péters and I am a PhD student at the University of Liège (Belgium). For my...

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Tom August

3 November 2022 10:16am

RaspberryPi-maggedon!

We are having this problem too and it might be worthy of its own thread! The lack of RaspberryPis is a big problem and we are currently looking into alternatives. We haven't found one yet, but if we do I will let you know. @Max_Sitt might have some suggested alternatives for his system?

Maximilian Sittinger

4 November 2022 10:54am

Hi Julien,

 

we are working with the Luxonis OAK-1 which can run lightweight detection models (e.g. YOLOv5n/s) directly on-device. However you will still need a host, for outdoor deployment Raspberry Pi (e.g. Zero 2 W) is perfect. But for testing you could also use another Linux-based system as host device or just connect it to e.g. your notebook. You can find more info in the Luxonis Docs.

 

Regarding the Raspberry Pi availability, this blog post from Jeff Geerling probably sums up the current situation pretty well. I hope in Q1 2023 the situation will get better, but at the moment nobody really knows for sure.

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event

Workshop IV: Pollinator monitoring

Alba Gomez Segura

21 October 2022 12:27pm

This workshop is part of a series of online meetings to share experiences around the globe using automated technology (Cameras + AI) to monitor moths and other nocturnal insects.

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Valentin Ștefan

3 November 2022 8:18pm

This sounds amazing and I advertised it among my colleagues. Unfortunately, most probably I will not be able to attend, however, would be nice if you can provide the recording...
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