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Autonomous Camera Traps for Insects / Feed

Camera trapping for insects is becoming a reality using advances in camera, AI, and autonomous systems technologies. This group discusses the latest advances, shares experiences, and offers a space for anyone interested in the technology, from beginners to experts.

Group curators

Tom August
Computational ecologist with interests in computer vision, citizen science, open science, drones, acoustics, data viz, software engineering, public engagement
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discussion

Feedback on PCB for Mothbox

Andrew Quitmeyer

2 May 2025 8:50pm

Hi folks! In 4 days I head to Seeedstudio in Shenzhen where we are going to try to produce a manufacturable Mothbox PCB! The idea behind this PCB is that someone who wants a...

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Kim Hendrikse

3 May 2025 7:45am

Nice seeing what you are doing here. Those converters are nice, I’m using them with my portable thermal cameras.


do you have solar power intentions here ? If so, maybe you need a way to detect when the battery is almost out of power?

Andrew Quitmeyer

3 May 2025 2:22pm

The mothbox can currently be attached to a solar panel super easy (just plug in a barrel jack up to 20v 80 watts) and it charges the talentcell battery. We also monitor the power with an adafruit INA260 which can tell if the voltage is getting low.  Ideally if we get enough time that will get built into the PCB too!

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Link

Sticky Pi: A smart insect trap to study daily activity in the field

Amber Balfour-Cunningham

29 April 2025 3:25pm

Sticky Pis are scalable, smart sticky traps using a high frequency Raspberry Pi camera to automatically score when, which and where insects were captured. Author: Quentin Geissmann, 2023

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Insect Detect: Build your own insect-detecting camera trap!

Maximilian Pink

29 April 2025 3:21pm

Sharing this website that provides instructions on DIY hardware assembly, software setup, model training and deployment of the Insect Detect camera trap that can be used for automated insect monitoring. Authors: Maximilian Sittinger, Johannes Uhler, Maximilian Pink, Annette...

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discussion

What is the best light for attracting moths?

Tom August

17 October 2022 3:12pm

We want to upgrade the UV lights on our moth traps. We currently use a UV fluorescent tube, but we are thinking about moving to a LED setup, like the LepiLED or EntoLED. We think...

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Taylor Casalena

21 March 2025 12:21pm

I found this thread on inaturalist really helpful when considering options! Lots of cost effective set ups to consider. I only really do mothing, so this is moth specific, but perhaps helpful for other insects.

I love that folks also mentioned using an additional flashlight or outward facing light to draw in moths from farther away. I've tried that as well and it always seemed to boost the number of moths on my sheet. 

For continuity, if the light goes away for more than a few seconds I feel like the spell is broken and they fly away. But this could be tested further. Curious if blinking makes a difference.

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discussion

WILDLABS AWARDS 2024 - Enhancing Pollinator Conservation through Deep NeuralNetwork Development

Liz Ferguson

7 April 2024 5:55pm

Greetings Everyone, We are so excited to share details of our WILDLABS AWARDS project "Enhancing Pollinator Conservation through Deep Neural Network Development" and...

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Amber Balfour-Cunningham

19 April 2025 12:40pm

Great work! Do you think the night time models also worked better due to lack of interference from shadows being counted? or maybe issues around a non-standard background. 

If it helps, I believe the creators of InsectDetect which is open source, did a lot of work training their model to differentiate insect shadows vs. insects. Also after testing their smart trap on flowers, went with a standardised, non-lethal attractive background.

InsectDetect: Build your own insect-detecting camera trap!

A .gif of a smart insect trap interface, using object detection to identify and track insects in real time. The background is a stylized image with large flower-like shapes simulating a floral or crop environment.
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discussion

Mothbox - Upcoming Features

Andrew Quitmeyer

7 March 2025 8:03pm

Unfortunately we are currently out of funding, and even our amazing Fulbright Student @briannaljohns is looking like her funding will be cutoff as the US crumbles :(However that's...

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Ryan Smith

7 March 2025 10:02pm

Hey Andrew, sad to hear funding has run out, but some very interesting developments!

It may be worth a conversation, I could definitely help on some of the above points from an electronics standpoint!

Kim Hendrikse

8 March 2025 9:32am

Really nice to see all that creative energy at work! Keep it up 👍🏻❤️

Adrien Pajot

10 March 2025 3:45pm

@hikinghack that's a complete update!

A lot of compassion regarding the budget situation, especially knowing how great @briannaljohns is.

It’s great to see a clear plan for the hardware development! I hope you'll have nice outcomes from it! 

 

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article

NewtCAM observations

Xavier Mestdagh

24 February 2025 7:06pm

NewtCAM is an underwater camera trap. Devices are getting deployed worldwide in the frame of the CAMPHIBIAN project and thanks to the support of our kind early users. Here an outcome from the UK.

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discussion

New Affordable Autonomous Insect Camera Trap

Guillaume Charron

14 January 2025 2:59pm

Outreach Robotics (based in Canada) has been working on a new insect camera trap to fill a gap. Our focus was on portability, affordability, energy efficiency, and ease of...

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Iqbal Bhalla

21 February 2025 7:30pm

On a similar topic, I'm curious about how technology like this could be adapted to terrestrial insects - such as pest beetles in agricultural fields. Any landscape level monitoring effort usually demands dozens if not hundreds of sites monitored over many days or weeks. At this scale, the costs add up, even with cheap devices.

From what I understand, a large part of the cost of these devices is the need for big batteries powering bright lights. Have you done any tests using sunlight alone? I can imagine that this would introduce variation in shadows based on the time of day, and that would make automated ID harder, but is this an insurmountable challenge?

Ryan Smith

23 February 2025 4:23pm

Very cool! Looks like a repurposed case for other wildlife cameras?

Do you have custom electronics?

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discussion

Mothbox Expedition Video - Preview

Kit Quitmeyer

6 February 2025 8:44pm

In case anyone is curious, the Dinalab team put together a quick video preview of our upcoming documentary video about the mothbox and our cerro hoya expedition!

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Kit Quitmeyer

6 February 2025 9:02pm

featuring @briannajohns @hikinghack @Hubertszcz

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discussion

Big Mothbox Expedition!

Andrew Quitmeyer

23 January 2025 3:19pm

The mothbox team has re-assembled in panama for our upcoming expedition. @briannajohns @Hubertszcz and I are leading a crew to do a vertical transect of Cerro Hoya.This is a...

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Adrien Pajot

23 January 2025 4:44pm

@hikinghack and @Hubertszcz , you know how excited I am about this transect/sub-project so please, do take as many pictures and info as you can. Looking forward to reading from you! 

Arky

24 January 2025 8:53am

Sounds like so much fun. 

Would love to replicate this one out here in Cambodia

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discussion

User Friendly Whole-Image Labelling Software for Taxonomy?

Andrew Quitmeyer

16 July 2024 6:26pm

So we made some great success in detecting all the insects in our raw images. Now we have thousands and thousands of photos of singular insects and the ability to create...

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Andrew Quitmeyer

7 November 2024 12:29pm

We ended up building our own for using with bioCLIP where we just specify tags like "ORDER_Lepidoptera" "CLASS_Insecta" but would be cool to use an established schema

Larry O'Brien

15 November 2024 5:34pm

I have the same problem and "roll your own," has seemed the answer so far. If you do find a pre-existing solution, please share the info!

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discussion

From Scratch Tutorial on AI Object Detection

Andrew Quitmeyer

10 July 2024 2:32pm

Earlier I had put out a call for help: Anyone wanna teach me to Yolo? (Offline) trying to figure out how to set up an offline machine learning system to train on our own custom...

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Lars Holst Hansen

8 November 2024 11:21am

I believe you can indeed export detections as json files - but I have yet to try it out myself! I have more than 500k events with images from our data collection and test of the polar bear camera alarm in the zoo, so I need some automated tools to assist with going throug and prepare the data for training.

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discussion

Mothbox Updates v4.12

Andrew Quitmeyer

11 September 2024 5:27pm

We have been super busy deploying another dozen mothboxes around panama while also adding cool new features! So i have a backlog of updates to post about! So here's a bunch...

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Kim Hendrikse

15 September 2024 6:51am

Super effort. Nice reporting!

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discussion

Mothbox Public Release

Andrew Quitmeyer

11 September 2024 4:56pm

Yay! We finally got all our documentation refined, and after dozens of iterations and updates we are happy to finally publicly release the mothbox! Please share...

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