AI Biomonitoring Platform

InsectEye: insect-centered automated biodiversity monitoring

A real-time, continuous-deployment camera system designed from the ground up around insect behavior, enabling biodiversity monitoring at ecologically meaningful scales without proportional increases in labor.

In active development · Grozinger Lab, Penn State

Overview

Why insect-centered design?

Conventional wildlife cameras are engineered around vertebrate motion and scale. InsectEye rethinks every hardware and software decision (field of view, trigger timing, illumination spectrum, and detection pipeline) around the scale, speed, and behavior of flying insects. The result is a platform purpose-built for the organisms it measures.

Developed in collaboration with the Grozinger Lab at Penn State, InsectEye is part of a broader effort to lower the per-sample cost of insect biodiversity data so that ecologists can run experiments at the spatial and temporal replication that ecological inference actually requires.

InsectEye deployed in an open meadow with mountain backdrop

InsectEye deployed in a meadow field site.

InsectEye unit with solar panel and weatherproof case

Full system: enclosure, solar panel, and data logger.

Zachary Bunch standing with the InsectEye unit in the field

Field setup at a monitoring site.

Capabilities

What the system does.

Continuous real-time detection

Passive, always-on monitoring captures insect visitation events without observer presence or disturbance, enabling 24-hour activity profiles.
Computer vision classification

On-device or cloud-based deep learning pipelines identify insects to taxonomic group, supporting pollinator network and community-level analyses.
Landscape-scale deployment

Low-cost, field-ruggedized hardware designed for concurrent multi-site deployment across landscape gradients and experimental plots.
Validation against manual counts

Systematic benchmarking against pan-trap, sweep-net, and timed-observation methods to quantify detection efficiency and bias correction factors.

Publication

Associated research.

InsectEye: Insect-centered design of real-time automated monitoring system for insect biodiversity

Geng J., Zhuang S., Bunch Z.L.T., Patch H.M., Grozinger C.M.

In preparation In prep

Collaborators

Built with.

Grozinger Lab · Penn State Center for Pollinator Research INSECT NET Penn State Dept. of Entomology