Look into evorta.  

It is an Australian company that is doing exactly this.  

You can.

• Have an offline camera that can be trained to ID specific species, 
• send you just the photos of those species via satellite 
• Or if you can get 4g send you all the photos to their online database. 
• They also have an online database that allows you to analyse the data in real time. 
• They can also hack normal camera traps so they can send photos back to the main unit to process and send valid photos.  That way you only need one ‘smart’ camera.  All the rest can be your exsisting cameras. You just need to use your sd card slot.  

Here is an article here  

 Best to contact him through email.  

I’ll send it to you privately 

Hi Sarah,

I am working with @Max_Sitt on the same project to develop artificial flowers as a platform for hoverfly monitoring (also as a landing platform for his camera trap).

We have preliminary results on the attractiveness of different shapes and colors on two hoverfly species in the lab. We can not help you with useful results without fieldwork data, but maybe some ideas.

According to the literature, bees will probably go for different (structurally more complex) flowers than hoverflies. If this is the case, you won't find a highly attractive "one-fits-all" solution for the shape or any other floral characteristic. However, the color could be the most basic flower trait and, therefore, could address a variety of pollinators. With a simple structure and a universally attractive color, you might have a chance for a good trade off between attractiveness and species spectrum.

The spray colors used as standard colors for pan traps in Germany (according to C. Westphal) could be a good start for you:

Sparvar 3107 "Leuchtblau", Sparvar 3104 (aka RAL 1026) "Leuchtgelb" and Sparvar "Leuchtweiß" 3108

These strong fluorescent colours have also been tested in Diestelhorst et al. 2014 (only available in German) and they showed a good response of pollinators in general for the white and yellow color in comparison with non-fluorescent colors. If you look for publications by Klaus Lunau, you will find a lot on fluorescent colors and UV-reflectance in (artificial) flowers. But once again, there seems to be no universal pattern among all flowers and all pollinators that we can use to trigger landings.

Currently, we are experimenting with fluorescent, translucent PMMA aka Suncatchers. When we sprayed orange Suncatchers with a strong fluorescent neon yellow on the bottom side, they were very attractive to one of our tested species. Their "sun catching effect" is then visible all over the surface as a diffuse glowing.

We also had good experiences with some glass droplets that resemble nectar. Specifically a half-sphere of 5 mm diameter with mirror foliage underneath. You can get them at a DIY store.

My best guess would be to paint a platform all green and then have circles in different diameters (2-8 cm) sprayed on them with the three pan trap colors. Add some glass droplets, and you might be good for now. However, the field trials will show how much my guesses are worth here:)

Best regards,

Max

Hi Sarah, 

I'm currently doing a PhD with @tom_august to create artificial flowers for pollinator monitoring. I'm currently looking into the key attraction cues for each broad group of diurnal pollinators. These include colour, UV, and scent and I will be performing experiments in the future to see how attractive artificial flowers can be using several different attraction cues.

Much like you already know, yellow, white and blue are good colours. A lot of insects have a preference for yellow and it is a very common generalist colour. A lot of fly species like yellow. Some insects like bees, bee-flies, and diurnal moths prefer blue. Butterflies have a preference for bright reds, oranges, and blues. It is worth having a mix of different colours if you want to attract wider variety of insects and using UV reflectance with the yellow should help as well. Like @MaximilianPink said, a green background has also shown to be effective for contrast. 

I'll be comparing the attraction of realistic 3D printed artificial flowers to coloured paper and pan traps in an experiment with naïve bumblebees soon so I can keep you updated on the results from that.  I hope in the future, if everything works, I can get a bunch of different monitoring system using my artificial flowers. 

Please let me know if you have any questions!

Abra 

ChatGPT is not at all reliable for pulling in scientific information - in fact it is not able to pull Google-able real information. Its database is very limited and for everything it doesn't know the answer to, it simply makes something up!

Here is an example: I asked ChatGPT what is the difference between scorpionfish and stonefish and a bunch of follow up questions. They were answered in a "seemingly" reliable way. But when I asked if any of these two species are on the IUCN vulnerable or endangered list, it said yes. I asked for "any examples?",  it returned 4 results with actual species scientific names for each category (BTW - I was just testing if it could understand my 2x2 question, I am an HCI expert, so I was just curious). However, a quick Google search returned that these species were actually of "Least Concern". Partially fake information is even more dangerous than 100% fake.  I would have so much preferred if ChatGPT had said, "I am not sure, why don't you Google that..."At least it had the decency to admit the mistake and apologise when caught ;-)

So, please do not use ChatGPT to write grant proposals or any of the other ambitious use cases mentioned in this forum by relying on the data it returns - not without googling and validating everything yourself! At least not yet. When ChatGPT gets married to Alexa :-) and can search and analyse web information reliably, then we will be one step closer to an indeed powerful tool for searching and composing information for grants, reviews, reports etc. Even then, scientists will still need to be able to trace and validate the data sources.

Hi Akiba,

Have dealt with some conservation groups who have setup LoRaWAN networks, depending on the type of requirement, what would yours be?

Rupert

This just popped up on my twitter feed - Alex Rogers appeared on this radio episode, might be worth a listen!

Our original tweet about this question is still getting replies! @baddiwad just jumped in to share her experiences in South Africa. I'm looking forward to our Inventory going live so all these can be captured in reviews on different hardware product pages! 

Hi Nick,

First up, disclaimer that I'm not really into hardware stuff, but here's my best understanding.

Shameless plug but take a look here if you haven't already - there's a fairly thorough discussion of available hardware: 

Secondly, I've not really used SM Mini (got one sat in a draw largely unused) but have heard feedback from several people, including a highly respected wildlife sound recorder yesterday. All have found that the very strange frequency response with a big peak in response at 6kHz to be a big problem, leading to odd recording quality and difficulty trusting results. I think particularly in Amazonia, you're likely to find a big peak in insect stridulation amplitude at around the 6kHz mark at any time away from the dawn chorus, so setting gain that will capture a large amount of other taxa without being completely dominated by insect noise ta 6Khz would seem a pretty impossible challenge.

If I was starting anew project now, I think my first choice would be SM Mini, although I think I'd take a good look at Titley Chorus, and Audiomoths if I could get my hands on any.

Good luck, and feel free to DM me on Twitter if you want to chat about Amazonian recording (@ecoacou_ollie). I don't check Wildlabs as often as I should (sorry Steph!), despite it beinga fantastic resource.

Cheers,

Ollie

Frequency response plot from Wildlife Acoustics website:

Abhijit and Hari joined us at our Variety Hour show to talk in more detail about this project - check it out to learn more about how it's progressing.