ZooLog Sensor System

Number of insects is a very basic measure in integrated pest management or in many fields of environmental protection and related scientific applications. However, in spite of the long run counting insects can be obtained with incredibly low precision, due to very high spatial and temporal variability of insects’ occurrence. Even it is fashionable for centuries, measuring number of individuals of real insect populations in the field WITH AN APPROPRIATE ACCURACY is still unsolved.

That is exactly what we wish to solve by developing a sensor system that will automatically provide data. The innovative sensor traps will detect pests without human intervention, and then automatically send the capture data to the server.

The innovation developed for automatic detection and rapid assessment is beneficial in several ways: it resolves not only human resource constraints, making it more economical to plant protection, but provides more accurate measurements lowering the environmental impact of pest protection. From the scientific point of view even the most basic laws of population dynamics models argue, not to mention the nearly 100 years of experience, that at the early appearance of a pest, its population grows near exponentially leading to a sudden outbreak. If we can detect this population growth in time and with a temporal resolution that is a magnitude higher than ever before, then the population size estimates will be more accurate. In practice this means that it cannot happen that due to a rare trap control one misses the occurrence of the pest resulting in a higher infection which can only be protected in a way that has a too intense an impact on the environment. This development is based on our earlier researches: we use and remodel two devices: EDAPHOLOG® sensors, which had been developed in our previous LIFE project to monitor soil-living microarthropods and the CSALOMON® pheromone traps already used for several pest species. CSALOMON® traps have successfully been used ever since 1993 (on the product list of 2012, there are pheromone traps for as many as about 100 different pests).

In the frame of INSECTLIFE project we have prototyped probes (sensors within traps) for several types of insects: flying insects (lepidopterans: moths and butterflies, flies) detected by VARL probe, crawling insects (like Western corn rootworms) by KLP probe, click-beetles by YF probe, and surface-living and soil living microarthropods by EDAPHOLOG® probe. ZooLog sensor system consists of probes, loggers and a central database: data are transferred via internet and activity patterns of insect populations in time, (e.g. swarming) are visualised available on any internet browser.

TBC