BioClip (referenced in their writeup) is good to know about.
I run a small scale wildlife monitoring program with usually 3 cameras (depending on how many are being repaired for battery terminal corrosion). Each month I skim through and categorize ~200 videos that we've captured. Doesn't take too long, but it would be nice to automate at some point.
Are there any "citizen science" initiatives where I can buy a device like this and upload my insect counts to some database that's useful for researchers?
I have been interested in setting up some things like home weather monitoring, ADS-B, streaming webcams for wildlife, etc. anyway so this would be a fun item to add to that.
I think the air gradient folks do some collaboration and it's possible you could get your sensors linked into a bigger net by contacting them: https://www.airgradient.com/research/
Edit: Also MIT did this recently: https://news.mit.edu/2023/low-cost-device-can-measure-air-po...
Cornell is doing something along those lines for birds using audio recordings. It’s just a smartphone app though - https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/sound-id/
I was using it today, and any day when there are birds around. It correctly identifies birds you can barely hear. It's become as useful as binoculars to me. A great free app.
On a related note, I wish there was some sort of software system where I could ID weeds and insects with photos and locations at various levels of confidence (“possibly”, “probably”, keyed out, genetic testing) at different taxonomic levels and both self host my results while also automatically contributing to a larger project.
There are various projects out there (like plantnet) but I don’t want to burn massive personal effort curating in a system that isn’t my own first and foremost, due to inevitable enshittification. At the same time, I want others to benefit from what I do, in particular local growers and naturalists. Things like PlantNet also tend to be “majority vote” on ID, meaning a whole lot is often close, but wrong. For example there is a regional plant specific to my area called Willamette Navarretia. Those that don’t realize this will easily confuse it with very similar looking species found most elsewhere in the western US, and last I checked it wasn’t in PlantNet.
https://www.oregon.gov/oda/programs/PlantConservation/SiteAs...
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/165663-Navarretia-willamett...
This could be a great teaching tool, BUT at about $375 per Mothbox, it's going to be a hard sell for most schools.
I don’t think it’ll be a hard sell for schools at that price, school budgets tend to be fairly elastic for new things (and sometimes for wholly unnecessary things, for the price of less than 1/4th of new MacBook for the principal (for example) they could have this.
Edit: also if schools were to be interested in this (which they should be, it’s very neat) they could group together and buy in bulk which would also greatly reduce the price
$375 per box doesn't seem bad to me at all when you probably only need a couple per school?