Insect detect: An open-source DIY camera trap for automated insect monitoring

• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0295474
• Publication Date: 2024-04-03T17:24:41Z
• Authors: Maximilian Sittinger; Johannes Uhler; Maximilian Pink; Annette Herz
• Keywords: Citizen Science

Insect monitoring is essential to design effective conservation strategies, which are indispensable mitigate worldwide declines and biodiversity loss. For this purpose, traditional methods widely established can provide data with a high taxonomic resolution. However, processing of captured insect samples often time-consuming expensive, limits the number potential replicates. Automated facilitate collection at higher spatiotemporal resolution comparatively lower effort cost. Here, we present Detect DIY (do-it-yourself) camera trap for non-invasive automated flower-visiting insects, based on low-cost off-the-shelf hardware components combined open-source software. Custom trained deep learning models detect track insects landing an artificial flower platform in real time on-device subsequently classify cropped detections local computer. Field deployment solar-powered confirmed its resistance temperatures humidity, enables autonomous during whole season. On-device detection tracking estimate activity/abundance after metadata post-processing. Our classification model achieved top-1 accuracy test dataset generalized well real-world images. The software highly customizable be adapted different use cases. With custom models, as accessible programming, many possible applications surpassing our proposed method realized.