Automated monitoring: using wildlife cameras, eDNA methods, and other new technologies present a lot of promise for biodiversity monitoring because they allow us to see what species and taxa are using habitats when we can’t be there. They offer promise to support non-destructive sampling in sensitive habitats. But it’s also not clear how these new methods compare to more classical monitoring strategies: they may be more (or less!) sensitive to interactions with the environment, they may capture different activity patterns, and likely will capture data at a different taxonomic resolution than what we typically get from classical field surveys of insects. These automated methods also tend to produce a lot of data, which can present processing and storage issues, and their ‘real-time’ nature can present privacy and ethical issues when data are made publicly available. Developing workflows to make sense of automated monitoring data, and to make it interoperable with existing insect biodiversity data, is critical for being able to make use of these new technologies and interpret them in context.
The automated monitoring working group brings together technical approaches to automated monitoring, and develops and shares strategies to process and integrate automated biodiversity data with existing monitoring strategies.
Please contact Jamie Alison at jalison@ecos.au.dk if you are interested in joining this working group.