2025-LU6 Integration of multi-sensory technology solutions to use visual and acoustic sensor systems for wildlife and eco-system monitoring

Overview

The evaluation and collection of data for physical, biological and anthropogenic factors that may affect a wide range of taxa in UK environments is of increasing importance for understanding behavioural, community and conservational ecology of these groups and their complex interactions under a range of stimuli from agricultural practice, urbanisation, climate change effects, etc. To do this efficiently the development and use of new, and the integrations of existing technologies for environmental applications offers exciting possibilities for improved efficiencies and quality for the collection of ecological data. For example, the assessment of the health of the UK’s insect populations is a key national research target. Multi-spectral optical / infrared techniques combined with Artificial Intelligence / Machine learning (AI/ML) methodologies in an Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensor framework offers opportunities to augment current assessment practices to higher levels of coverage, detail and data quality. It is proposed to undertake multi-disciplinary research to develop and evaluate new optical and acoustic technologies and methods to automate long-term data collection of ecological relevant metrics associated insect populations and behaviours in a variety of micro-habitats at an established rural field site.  This site would be used to evaluate the developed technologies and methods over seasonal and insect species life cycle variations, population variations, habitat use, predator-prey interactions etc. and to use this test site as a launch pad to wider dissemination of these methods to larger (national) deployments once established.  The research will review and evaluate the use of these technologies and methodologies integrated with for example traditional insect survey techniques such as physical sample methodologies and genetic analysis (acting as ground truthing data) as well as the long-term monitoring of natural and bioacoustics acoustic environments and species specific ‘sound scapes’. These integrated methods offer a wider viewpoint through assessment of birds and bat species and potentially mammal’s behaviours and their co-habitat use as well as potential insights into interactions with insects. This will be integrated with other environmental factors such as meteorology, air quality and anthropogenic interactions such as woodland management, agriculture practice, anthropogenic noise etc. from a holistic environment viewpoint.     

Figure 1: Iterative design concept of a multi-sensor integrated system development for assessment of insect species ‘health’ using multi-sensor technologies and machine learning.