About This Project

Moths and other night-active insects are entrapped by UV light, a feature useful to study them. However, photographing hundreds of insects at moth light sheet is time-consuming and limits our ability to study them. We are prototyping an automatic insect monitoring tool. By making a low-cost, open-source, and jungle-proof design, we can use it to test how different habitat restoration efforts improve nocturnal insect diversity and help prioritize more effective conservation strategies.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Light traps are a basic, but key method for surveying insect biodiversity in natural areas. The practice is simple, a very bright light shines on a white sheet and scientists monitor what insects arrive on the sheet at night. This method is ubiquitous in tropical ecology, but highly labor intensive for sampling many areas over long periods of time.

We will build an automated light trap that uses computer vision to automatically photograph and identify moths, based on the prototype designed by Bjerge et al., in collaboration with Dinalab. We all add open-source motion capture scripts and data analysis tools from Sondhi et al. along with guides and images to recreate the setup. We will then use it to monitor nocturnal insect diversity to test habitat restoration efficacy.

What is the significance of this project?

Unlike other models currently under development, the final design will be optimized for weight and cost and tested with diverse groups of community scientists in tropical jungle conditions in India, Panama and Costa Rica.

Current insect conservation efforts are limited by how quickly we can identify and record them, and while there is a growing community of moth research in these areas (MOI, Guanacaste moths), large-scale and systematic sampling is missing and often requires more labour and resources than are available.

By automating the process and building plans for a jungle-proof, DIY and cloud-upload-based design and making them open source, we can increase the scale of insect monitoring required in these tropical biodiversity hotspots and test restoration effort efficacy.

What are the goals of the project?

First, we want to test how the automatic surveys perform compared to manual surveys.

We will improve existing prototypes for the trap, our goal will be to make it waterproof, battery-operated, and assemblable with low-cost and widely available components. We will test various light sources, camera modules, and motion capture or time-lapse solutions. The final prototypes will be compared using nightly diversity estimates to manual surveys.

Next, we will use this device to test the effect of land type on nocturnal insect diversity. We will simultaneously collect data across multiple land use types in the Azuero Peninsula of Panama and quantify the biodiversity benefits of restoring forested areas compared to plantations or agriculture.