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
- 5 Resources
- 49 Discussions
- 5 Groups
- 7 Resources
- 2 Discussions
- 5 Groups
DIY electronics for behavioral field biology
- 1 Resources
- 56 Discussions
- 4 Groups
Holder of BSc in Applied Zoology. Ecologist at Ruaha National park
- 0 Resources
- 1 Discussions
- 8 Groups
Aarhus University
Biologist and Research Technician working with ecosystem monitoring and research at Zackenberg Research Station in Greenland
- 12 Resources
- 216 Discussions
- 7 Groups
- @sydpichette
- | she/her
Smith College
ecology lover, insect enthusiast
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 1 Groups
Worked as a mechanical engineer for a defence co, then software engineer, then for a research lab specialising in underwater robotics.
- 1 Resources
- 139 Discussions
- 16 Groups
- @StephODonnell
- | She / Her
WILDLABS & Fauna & Flora
I'm the Executive Manager at WILDLABS.
- 152 Resources
- 668 Discussions
- 30 Groups
Interested in automated insect monitoring.
- 0 Resources
- 15 Discussions
- 3 Groups
- @HRees
- | Him/His
WILDLABS & Fauna & Flora
WILDLABS - Programme Development Manager, keen interest in bats, hyaenas and tech!
- 6 Resources
- 2 Discussions
- 4 Groups
Freaklabs
I'm an engineer and product designer working on wildlife conservation technology.
- 0 Resources
- 273 Discussions
- 14 Groups
- @TaliaSpeaker
- | She/her
WILDLABS & World Wide Fund for Nature/ World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
I'm the WILDLABS Research Specialist at WWF-US
- 13 Resources
- 56 Discussions
- 24 Groups
Wildlife Drones
Wildlife Drones has developed the world’s most innovative radio animal-tracking system using drones so you can track your radio-tagged animals like never before.
- 11 Resources
- 8 Discussions
- 32 Groups
- @capreolus
- | he/him
Capreolus e.U.
wildlife biologist with capreolus.at
- 1 Resources
- 70 Discussions
- 16 Groups
Do you have photos and videos of your conservation tech work? We want to include them in a conservation technology showcase video
17 May 2024
€2,000 travel grants are available for researchers interested in insect monitoring using automated cameras and computer vision
3 May 2024
Article
Read in detail about how to use The Inventory, our new living directory of conservation technology tools, organisations, and R&D projects.
1 May 2024
Article
The Inventory is your one-stop shop for conservation technology tools, organisations, and R&D projects. Start contributing to it now!
1 May 2024
The Smithsonian National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute is seeking a Postdoctoral Research Fellow to help us integrate movement data & camera trap data with global conservation policy.
22 April 2024
We invite applications for the third Computer Vision for Ecology (CV4E) workshop, a three-week hands-on intensive course in CV targeted at graduate students, postdocs, early faculty, and junior researchers in Ecology...
12 February 2024
The primary focus of the research is to explore how red deer movements, space use, habitat selection and foraging behaviour change during the wolf recolonization process.
10 February 2024
Outstanding chance for a motivated and ambitious individual to enhance their current project support skills by engaging with a diverse array of exciting projects in the field of biodiversity science.
11 December 2023
Two-year postdoc in AI and remote sensing for citizen-science pollinator monitoring, at Aarhus University. The successful candidate will integrate our computational entomologist team to develop and deploy novel methods...
4 December 2023
Join the NightLife team where you'll blend entomology expertise with technological innovation using automated insect monitoring.
25 October 2023
Article
We are a group of students at UW-Madison who have built a working prototype for insect imaging. The light trap is aimed at photographing aquatic insects.
18 September 2023
Apply for funding (£500,000-£750,000) to develop software systems, which will help to improve biodiversity monitoring by automating the analysis of images and videos
12 July 2023
June 2024
June 2024
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February 2024
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December 2023
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Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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Hey Andrew, this is really awesome. I'm sure there are loads of people who ran into the same problems as you and will find your script super useful.As you might know, we launched... |
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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects | 7 hours 9 minutes ago | |
The LEDs use most of the energy, the UV leds are about 12-15 watts. the pi hangs out around 3 watts. and the white flashing LEDs use about 10 watts each, but we reduced their time... |
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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects | 7 hours 52 minutes ago | |
Hey there @JakeBurton , sorry, I did not see your message! Why don't you shoot me an email with some tentative availability to luca.pegoraro (at) wsl.ch, and we take it from... |
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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects | 2 weeks 5 days ago | |
Gotcha, well I look forward to seeing future iterations and following along with your progress!! |
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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects, AI for Conservation, Emerging Tech, Open Source Solutions | 1 month 2 weeks ago | |
More cool things surrounding the Mothbox project keep happening! Here’s a recap of cool developments over the past month!New Teammate! Bri... |
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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects | 1 month 2 weeks ago | |
Greetings Everyone, We are so excited to share details of our WILDLABS AWARDS project "Enhancing Pollinator Conservation through Deep... |
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AI for Conservation, Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects | 1 month 3 weeks ago | |
For our [mothbox project](https://forum.openhardware.science/c/projects/mothbox/73) we are programming pijuices and pis to automatically... |
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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects | 2 months 2 weeks ago | |
Hi, I made a little utility script that folks here might find useful (or might have MUCH BETTER VERSIONS OF! and if so, let me know!) ... |
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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects | 3 months ago | |
We did some more testing with the Mothbeam in the forest. It's the height of dry season right now, so not many moths came out, but the mothbeam shined super bright and attracted a... |
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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects | 3 months 2 weeks ago | |
Hi Danilo, yes just in time ;-) |
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Camera Traps, Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects | 4 months ago | |
Yep, here:Currently it only installs on older Jetsons as in the coming weeks I’ll finish the install code for current jetsons.Technically speaking, if you were an IT specialist... |
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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects, Camera Traps | 4 months 3 weeks ago | |
Great work! I very much look forward to trying out the MothBeam light. That's going to be a huge help in making moth monitoring more accessible.And well done digging into the... |
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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects | 4 months 3 weeks ago |
Auto-Wake a Pi5 without a Pijuice! (Mothbox)
25 April 2024 5:44pm
4 June 2024 7:50pm
cool!
my current measurer's minimum value was 0.1mA and it registered 0, so less than that.
note you need to change a thing in the boot config for rpi5 to not default its shutdown mode to one that consumes like 2mA, but after that i wasn't able to detect hardly any current.
4 June 2024 8:37pm
Hey Andrew, this is really awesome. I'm sure there are loads of people who ran into the same problems as you and will find your script super useful.
As you might know, we launched The Inventory last month--it's a wiki-style database for all things conservation technology. Based off this post, it sounds like you have some experience using Raspberry Pi in your work. It would be a huge help to the community if you could take some time and leave a review on Raspberry Pi's product page on The Inventory! Your review will help others in the community immensely. Let me know if you have any questions!
Testing, Deployment, Solar, Conferences - Mothbox update v3.21
24 May 2024 8:46pm
3 June 2024 10:35am
Thank you for the detailed post. This is amazing!
Have you experimented with ways of reducing power consumption? How much of the power is used by the LEDs vs the RPi? You could try having the LEDs on for less time, or less bright.
Julian
4 June 2024 7:54pm
The LEDs use most of the energy, the UV leds are about 12-15 watts. the pi hangs out around 3 watts. and the white flashing LEDs use about 10 watts each, but we reduced their time to like .8 seconds for a flash photo, so they aren't as much of a big deal.
you basically need a lot of power to make a really bright thing to attract the bugs, but we are testing out some more efficient UV leds
Computational Entomology Webinar III: Processing liquid samples
22 May 2024 12:40am
Share Your Work in a Conservation Technology Video
17 May 2024 9:06pm
Insect cameras in The Inventory
1 May 2024 9:26pm
2 May 2024 2:02pm
Hey @JakeBurton , nice work with The Inventory!
This is very aligned with some internal efforts going on in our community to map out devices, but also data and models eventually. It would be great if we find a way to make this two interoperable. We are still in the (very) alpha development phases, so it is quite open, but it would be super helpful to have some insight about the under-the-hood data structure that The Inventory is relying on, so we can figure out good ways to reliably map or info onto them.
Happy to chat further or set up a meeting!
@qgeissmann👀
3 May 2024 2:13pm
Thanks very much @LucaPego! Just to clarify, 'Products' does cover hardware, but it also includes software and databases as well. Basically anything that you can take and use in your work. Sounds like we should also be including models in that as well!
It would be great to see more databases and software listed and reviewed on there. We would also be interested to learn more about your internal efforts in your community and what overlap there is for sure. Could we set up a meeting?
16 May 2024 3:16pm
Hey there @JakeBurton , sorry, I did not see your message!
Why don't you shoot me an email with some tentative availability to luca.pegoraro (at) wsl.ch, and we take it from there?
Again sorry for the delay!
Travel grants for insect monitoring an AI
3 May 2024 5:20pm
The Inventory User Guide
1 May 2024 12:46pm
Introducing The Inventory!
1 May 2024 12:46pm
2 May 2024 3:08pm
3 May 2024 5:33pm
17 May 2024 7:29am
Postdoc: Biologging & Camera Trap Data Integration
22 April 2024 10:10pm
WILDLABS AWARDS 2024 – MothBox
15 April 2024 5:06am
18 April 2024 10:39am
Already an update from @hikinghack:
19 April 2024 12:00pm
Yeah we got it about as bare bones as possible for this level of photo resolution and duration in the field. The main costs right now are:
Pi- $80
Pijuice -$75
Battery - $85
64mp Camera - $60
which lands us at $300 already. But we might be able to eliminate that pijuice and have fewer moving parts, and cut 1/4 of our costs! Compared to something like just a single logitech brio camera that sells for $200 and only gets us like 16mp, we are able to make this thing as cheap as we could figure out! :)
19 April 2024 12:54pm
Gotcha, well I look forward to seeing future iterations and following along with your progress!!
Mothbox v3.2 Updates - Solar, HDR, Wifi Hotspots, and More!
18 April 2024 4:58am
WILDLABS AWARDS 2024 - Enhancing Pollinator Conservation through Deep NeuralNetwork Development
7 April 2024 5:55pm
Useful Script to easily program the Pijuice and Schedule Raspberry Pi happenings
17 March 2024 3:10am
Useful Pi Script for Backing Up
1 March 2024 6:34pm
Mothbox + Mothbeam Update: 4
31 January 2024 7:09pm
15 February 2024 4:49pm
We did some more testing with the Mothbeam in the forest. It's the height of dry season right now, so not many moths came out, but the mothbeam shined super bright and attracted a whole bunch of really tiny things that swarmed a lot
and some nocturnal bees
you could also see the mothbeam's aura from far away in the forest! so that was impressive!
I also tested out attaching a 12V USB booster cable to the Mothbeam, and it works
nice! So you can attach regular USB 5V battery packs to the mothbeam as well!
Computer Vision for Ecology Workshop 2025 Call for Applications
12 February 2024 9:29pm
Post-doc possition - Field spanning movement ecology, ecology of fear, bio-logging science, behavioral ecology, and ecological statistics
10 February 2024 7:20am
Underwater camera trap - call for early users
13 December 2023 11:44pm
23 January 2024 1:21pm
Many thanks for your contribution to the survey! We are now summarizing the list of early users and making our best to propose a newtcam to all in due time.
All the best!
Xavier
30 January 2024 10:20pm
Is there still time to apply?
31 January 2024 12:12pm
Hi Danilo, yes just in time ;-)
Computational Entomology Webinar II: Automated Pollinator Monitoring
23 January 2024 12:44pm
1st Joint International Scientific Conference
23 January 2024 8:34am
Testing Raspberry Pi cameras: Results
5 May 2023 5:11pm
5 September 2023 8:16am
And finally for now, the object detectors are wrapped by a python websocket network wrapper to make it easy for the system to use different types of object detectors. Usually, it's about 1/2 a day for me to write a new python wrapper for a new object detector type. You just need to wrap in the network connection and make it conform to the yolo way of expressing the hits, i.e. the json format that yolo outputs with bounding boxes, class names and confidence level.
What's more, you can even use multiple object detector models in different parts of a single captured image and you can cascade the logic to require multiple object detectors to match for example, or a choice from different object detectors.
It's the perfect anti-poaching system (If I say so myself :) )
10 January 2024 11:47pm
Hey @kimhendrikse , thanks for all these details. I just caught up. I like your approach of supporting multiple object detectors and using the python websockets wrapper! Is your code available somewhere?
11 January 2024 6:02am
Yep, here:
Currently it only installs on older Jetsons as in the coming weeks I’ll finish the install code for current jetsons.
Technically speaking, if you were an IT specialist you could even make it work in wsl2 Ubuntu on windows, but I haven’t published instructions for that. If you were even more of a specialist you wouldn’t need wsl2 either. One day I’ll publish instructions for that once I’ve done it. Though it would be slow unless the windows machine had an NVidia GPU and you PyTorch work with it.
Update 3: Cheap Automated Mothbox
31 December 2023 9:37pm
1 January 2024 9:18pm
This looks amazing! I'm currently work with hastatus bats up in Bocas, it would be really interesting to utilize some of these near foraging sites. Be sure to post again when you post the final documentation on github!
Also, Gamboa......dang I miss that little slice of heaven...
Super cool work Andrew!
Best,
Travis
5 January 2024 8:56pm
Thanks!!!
10 January 2024 11:33pm
Great work! I very much look forward to trying out the MothBeam light. That's going to be a huge help in making moth monitoring more accessible.
And well done digging into the picamera2 library to reduce the amount of time the light needs to be on while taking a photo. That is a super annoying issue!
Project support officer - Conservation Tech
11 December 2023 10:24pm
Project introductions and updates
2 August 2022 11:21am
29 March 2023 6:05pm
Hi all! I'm part of a Pollinator Monitoring Program at California State University, San Marcos which was started by a colleague lecturer of mine who was interested in learning more about the efficacy of pollinator gardens. It grew to include comparing local natural habitat of the Coastal Sage Scrub and I was initially brought on board to assist with data analysis, data management, etc. We then pivoted to the idea of using camera traps and AI for insect detection in place of the in-person monitoring approach (for increasing data and adding a cool tech angle to the effort, given it is of interest to local community partners that have pollinator gardens).
The group heavily involves students as researchers, and they are instrumental to the projects. We have settled on a combination of video footage and development of deep neural networks using the cloud-hosted video track detection tool, VIAME (developed by Kitware for NOAA Fisheries originally for fish track detection). Students built our first two PICTs (low-cost camera traps), and annotated the data from our pilot study that we are currently starting the process of network development for. Here's a cool pic of the easy-to-use interface that students use when annotating data:
Figure 1: VIAME software demonstrating annotation of the track of an insect in the video (red box). Annotations are done manually to develop a neural network for the automated processing.
The goal of the group's camera trap team is develop a neural network that can track insect pollinators associated with a wide variety of plants, and to use this information to collect large datasets to better understand the pollinator occurrence and activities with local habitats. This ultimately relates to native habitat health and can be used for long-term tracking of changes in the ecosystem, with the idea that knowledge of pollinators may inform resources and conservation managers, as well as local organizations in their land use practices. We ultimately are interested in working with the Kitware folks further to not only develop a robust network (and share broadly of course!), but also to customize the data extraction from automated tracks to include automated species/species group identification and information on interaction rate by those pollinators. We would love any suggestions for appropriate proposals to apply to, as well as any information/suggestions regarding the PICT camera or suggestions on methods. We are looking to include night time data collection at some point as well and are aware the near infrared is advised, but would appreciate any thoughts/advice on that avenue as well.
We will of course post when we have more results and look forward to hearing more about all the interesting projects happening in this space!
Cheers,
Liz Ferguson
5 April 2023 10:00pm
HI, indeed as Tom mentioned, I am working here in Vermont on moth monitoring using machines with Tom and others. We have a network going from here into Canada with others. Would love to catch up with you soon. I am away until late April, but would love to connect after that!
10 December 2023 5:10pm
The preprint to our camera trap paper is now available at bioRxiv.
Two-year postdoc in AI and remote sensing for citizen-science pollinator monitoring
4 December 2023 12:21pm
AWMS Conference 2023
Update 2: Cheap Automated Mothbox
23 October 2023 8:32pm
24 October 2023 9:05am
Hi Andrew,
thanks for sharing your development process so openly, that's really cool and boosts creative thinking also for the readers! :)
Regarding a solution for Raspberry Pi power management: we are using the PiJuice Zero pHAT in combination with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W in our insect camera trap. There are also other versions available, e.g. for RPi 4 (more info: PiJuice GitHub). From my experience the PiJuice works mostly great and is super easy to install and set up. Downsides are the price and the lack of further software updates/development. It would be really interesting if you could compare one of their HATs to the products from Waveshare. Another possible solution would be a product from UUGear. I have the Witty Pi 4 L3V7 lying around, but couldn't really test and compare it to the PiJuice HAT yet.
Is there a reason why you are using the Raspberry Pi 4? From what I understand about your use case, the RPi Zero 2 W or even RPi Zero should give enough computing power and require a lot less power. Also they are smaller and would be easier to integrate in your box (and generate less heat).
I'm excited for the next updates to see in which direction you will be moving forward with your Mothbox!
Best,
Max
25 October 2023 6:21pm
Thanks for these tips!
We are using a RPI4 because the people I am building it for want images from the 64MP camera from Arducam and so we have to use that to make that work.
27 October 2023 6:44am
Thanks a lot for this detailed update on your project! It looks great!
Entomological Research Specialist for Automated Insect Monitoring
25 October 2023 7:21pm
Cheap Automated Mothbox
31 August 2023 10:19pm
25 October 2023 5:04pm
I'm looking into writing a sketch for the esp32-cam that can detect pixel changes and take a photo, wish me luck.
25 October 2023 5:11pm
One question, does it even need motion detection? What about taking a photo every 5 seconds and sorting the photos afterwards?
25 October 2023 6:23pm
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 fidelity. For the box i am making we are doing exactly that, though maybe a photo every minute or so
Metadata standards for Automated Insect Camera Traps
24 November 2022 9:49am
2 December 2022 3:58pm
Yes. I think this is really the way to go!
6 July 2023 4:48am
Here is another metadata initiative to be aware of. OGC has been developing a standard for describing training datasets for AI/ML image recognition and labeling. The review phase is over and it will become a new standard in the next few weeks. We should consider its adoption when we develop our own training image collections.
24 October 2023 9:12am
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 their news post.
Best,
Max
3 June 2024 10:19am
How much current does the Pi 5 draw when it is sleeping?
I did an experiment recently and hand built one of the circuits from "Power switching RP2040 for low
standby current applications." It would be possible to design a little board/hat which combined that with an RTC to schedule complete shutdown more or less any Raspberry Pi. The RTC would draw only a tiny current.