Deze projecten zijn mede mogelijk gemaakt door diverse fondsen van de Europese Unie.
Sampling soil dwelling arthropods with pitfalls is time consuming and requires specialism to identify the species. With automated image recognition this constraint could be removed and pitfall trapping can become assessable for the generality of the public or farmers in particular to assess biodiversity on their fields. Space-value is a Portuguese enterprise that has a prototype automated pitfall trap that captures a picture right before the organism falls in the trap. In this R&D voucher project we aim to test this prototype for an arable situation and when necessary bring improvement to the design. We will train an algorithm to recognize soil arthropods and run this testing devise parallel to ordinary pitfall traps for comparison. We foresee that this technology may be a great asset for research purposes and for farmers who want to monitor biodiversity on their farm.
