Autonomous SmartTraps for remote monitoring Spotted Wing Drosophila in fruit crops

The accurate monitoring of pests is vital to profitable crop and livestock production and to human health and optimises pest management through improved interventions. This project will develop a full SmartTraps system for remote autonomous monitoring of Spotted Wing Drosophila (SWD), an invasive soft and stone fruit pest that has increased the cost of production of soft and stone fruit by 10% in most production regions globally including in the UK. The SmartTraps system will rapidly and accurately identify the near microscopic SWD males and females amongst a myriad of non-target species attracted by a broad-spectrum lure, by machine learning image analysis in compact, autonomous, non-saturating (node) traps. The catch data from networks of individual (node) traps will be transmitted via gateway stations to the cloud, with real time cloud-based data integration accessible on the web and a variety of mobile platforms as an aid to scheduling management treatments for the pest. The feasibility of two of the key core processes in this system, automatically capturing images and identifying them, was demonstrated in Innovate UK project 131787 (completed 30 June 2016), an important technological development and advancement in science. The SmartTraps system will be a significant advancement in pest specific monitoring technology with wide application for numerous pests globally, establishing the UK at the leading edge of this new ground breaking technology with huge international market potential with diverse applications in agriculture, health and the environment.