Autonomous camera traps for insects provide a tool for long-term remote monitoring of insects. These systems bring together cameras, computer vision, and autonomous infrastructure such as solar panels, mini computers, and data telemetry to collect images of insects.
With increasing recognition of the importance of insects as the dominant component of almost all ecosystems, there are growing concerns that insect biodiversity has declined globally, with serious consequences for the ecosystem services on which we all depend.
Automated camera traps for insects offer one of the best practical and cost-effective solutions for more standardised monitoring of insects across the globe. However, to realise this we need interdisciplinary teams who can work together to develop the hardware systems, AI components, metadata standards, data analysis, and much more.
This WILDLABS group has been set up by people from around the world who have individually been tackling parts of this challenge and who believe we can do more by working together.
We hope you will become part of this group where we share our knowledge and expertise to advance this technology.
Check out Tom's Variety Hour talk for an introduction to this group.
Learn about Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects by checking out recordings of our webinar series:
- Hardware design of camera traps for moth monitoring
- Assessing the effectiveness of these autonomous systems in real-world settings, and comparing results with traditional monitoring methods
- Designing machine learning tools to process camera trap data automatically
- Developing automated camera systems for monitoring pollinators
- India-focused projects on insect monitoring
Meet the rest of the group and introduce yourself on our welcome thread - https://www.wildlabs.net/discussion/welcome-autonomous-camera-traps-insects-group
Group curators
- @tom_august
- | he/him
Computational ecologist with interests in computer vision, citizen science, open science, drones, acoustics, data viz, software engineering, public engagement
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June 2024
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November 2023
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Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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It depends on which scientists you talk to. I am an favor of just doing a timelapse and doing a post-processing sort afterwards. There's not much reason i can see for such motion... |
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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects | 6 months ago | |
For anyone interested: the GBIF guide Best Practices for Managing and Publishing Camera Trap Data is still open for review and feedback until next week. More info can be found in... |
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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects, Camera Traps | 6 months ago | |
This is super cool! Me and @Hubertszcz and @briannajohns and several others are all working towards some big biodiversity monitoring projects for a large conservation project here... |
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AI for Conservation, Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects, Camera Traps | 7 months 1 week ago | |
Plasticy substances like polyester can be slippery, so I imagine that's why cotton is most often used. White is good for color correction, while still reflecting light pretty well... |
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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects | 7 months 3 weeks ago | |
I agree, this would be great for canopy work! |
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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects, Camera Traps, Emerging Tech, Marine Conservation | 8 months 3 weeks ago | |
Hi Ross, Where exactly did you put the UV paint? Was it on the petals or the actual middle of the flowers? I would recommend switching from sugar paste to sugar water... |
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Camera Traps, Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects | 9 months 1 week ago | |
Greetings, everyone! I'm thrilled to join this wonderful community. I work as a postdoctoral researcher at MeBioS KU Leuven having recently completed my PhD on "Optical insect... |
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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects | 9 months 1 week ago | |
A new COST action has been announced which will focus on the use of computer vision for monitoring insects.InsectAI will run for 4 years... |
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AI for Conservation, Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects, Camera Traps | 10 months ago | |
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... |
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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects | 11 months 1 week ago | |
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... |
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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects | 11 months 3 weeks ago | |
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... |
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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects | 1 year ago | |
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... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects, Camera Traps, Remote Sensing & GIS | 1 year ago |
Implementation of video surveillance to quantify the predation rate
25 October 2022 4:26pm
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.
Workshop IV: Pollinator monitoring
21 October 2022 12:27pm
3 November 2022 8:18pm
4 November 2022 9:10am
New conservation tech articles from Mongabay
20 October 2022 7:45pm
Most interesting images / sightings 'caught on camera'
12 August 2022 2:50pm
26 August 2022 12:07pm
No - the trap was in their path and they just walked through it. I've now moved it to a place they can't go. The biggest threat to the moths is from pied currawongs. I schedule the trap so it shuts off at least two before sunrise to try to avoid them feasting on the larger insects.
29 August 2022 6:18pm
At first I was finding wings below the screen in the morning when I put our units out. So I put a game camera on the units to see what was feeding and when. I found three bird species, likely 3 individuals, quickly found it to be a good bird feeder- Song Sparrow (most frequent), House Wren, and this Tufted Titmouse. I changed my units to turn off about 1.5 hours before dawn and that worked! Nearly all the moths left the scene before the birds came to visit.
26 September 2022 10:43pm
My most prized camera trap image - a hummingbird caught on camera!
Counting insect density automatically with Intel RealSense D455?
31 August 2022 3:54pm
23 September 2022 12:06pm
Might be good to add this to the 'Automated Camera Traps for Insects' group
Emerging technologies revolutionise insect ecology and monitoring
16 September 2022 10:11am
Identify animal from Image
2 August 2022 1:37am
2 August 2022 2:54am
Hi Jitendra.
If they are still images, many people are using Megadetector to analyze their images. I'm not sure how it will do in species classification, but it can tell you if there are images of interest in the shots. Others here can probably give you more detailed instructions on how to use it to batch process camera trap images.
2 August 2022 10:24am
Have you considered creating a Kaggle competition? If you already have lots of images, and some that have been labelled, then this could be a good way to get people working on a solution
Workshop III: Designing machine learning tools to process camera trap data automatically
1 August 2022 10:35am
Workshop II: Assessing automated insect monitoring
1 August 2022 10:23am
Workshop I: Automated moth monitoring deployments
1 August 2022 10:12am
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?