Automated Systems for Recording, Reporting, and Analyzing Trapping Data

Abstract

The substantial costs of labor to deploy and tend monitoring traps for agricultural pests provide strong impetus for the development and adoption of automated trapping systems. Early steps in this direction included mechanical devices to switch collecting vessels to determine when during a diel cycle pests were active. With the development of modern electronics, infrared beam detectors were incorporated into insect traps and technologies were borrowed from the electronics industry to automatically collect and transmit the trapping data from remote locations. The automated trapping systems currently penetrating the marketplace use cell phone technologies to transmit captured data as image files. We anticipate that such automated systems will be widely adopted as part of an integrated pest management (IPM) service industry collecting and then analyzing trapping data enabling the growers to make more precise and economical pest management decisions. The principles of trapping and catch interpretations reported in this book will assist these developments.