Towards global insect biomonitoring with frugal methods

Abstract

None of the global targets for protecting nature are currently met, although humanity is critically dependent on biodiversity. A significant issue is the lack of data for most biodiverse regions of the planet where the use of frugal methods for biomonitoring would be particularly important because the available funding for monitoring is insufficient, especially in low-income countries. We here discuss how three approaches to insect biomonitoring (computer vision, lidar, DNA sequences) could be made more frugal and urge that all biomonitoring techniques should be evaluated for global suitability before becoming the default in high-income countries. This requires that techniques popular in high-income countries should undergo a phase of ‘innovation through simplification’ before they are implemented more broadly. We predict that techniques that acquire raw data at low cost and are suitable for analysis with AI (e.g. images, lidar-signals) will be particularly suitable for global biomonitoring, while techniques that rely heavily on patented technologies may be less promising (e.g. DNA sequences). We conclude the opinion piece by pointing out that the widespread use of AI for data analysis will require a global strategy for providing the necessary computational resources and training. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Towards a toolkit for global insect biodiversity monitoring’.