Insect biodiversity in agriculture using IoT: opportunities and needs for further research

Recent research points out an alarming decline in insect biodiversity and biomass. Changing agriculture practices, together with climate change, are a main driver behind this decline. Biodiversity interventions in agriculture can therefore play an important role for insect conservation. Validating the impact of such interventions is limited by expertise and labor intensive methods, and there is a growing number of projects exploring how IoT could help. For instance using remote sensors to capture insect images and sound fingerprints non-intrusively, and machine learning models to automatically classify the observation in different taxa.This article will: (a) explore recent advances in Internet of Things, Edge ML and LPWAN technologies and their application for monitoring insect biodiversity; (b) discuss opportunities, needs and ideas for validating the impact of biodiversity interventions in agriculture using these technologies; and (c) outline future research opportunities.