Acoustic insect crop pest monitoring

Understanding the connection between insects and agriculture is critical for sustainable, high yield agriculture. From pests and pollinators, to predators, insects play a number of crucial roles that affect crop production around the UK. However, emerging challenges such as climate change, increasing pesticide resistance and regulatory changes, are altering how we manage insect populations, making understanding their and their behaviours and impact on agriculture less predictable.

Describing insect populations at a farm level is a key activity, with morning crop walks being a routine part of many farmers days. However, identifying insects of agricultural importance requires specialised knowledge, either acquired through years of experience or specialist entomological training. Given the extreme time pressures farmers, agronomists, and others within the crop production value chain face, the manual and time-consuming activity of inspecting for insect pests and crop damage can severely drain their already stretched schedules.

Winged insects produce distinctive flight sounds, which have been shown to create signature acoustic profiles that can be used for species identification. The proposed project here, is a combined market and technical development programme. We will investigate how the flight tones of winged insects of agricultural importance, can be captured, identified and described to suit the requirements of stakeholders across the crop production value chain in the East of England region.

This programme will establish exactly how our automated insect data can provide maximum value across all stakeholders through our unique approach of continuous market research, conducted in parallel with our technical refinement of prototype devices.

enstic design and develop insect identification devices, using our combined expertise across entomology, data science, hardware engineering and agriculture. Through this development project, we will identify how our devices can provide automated insect population data to enable more sustainable, predictable and productive crop production within the East of England region.