Biodiversity Sensor: A Customized and Power Efficient Solution for Biodiversity Surveillance

Pollinators play a vital role in ecosystem conservation, and their extinction would pose a serious threat to our existence. Recent research has revealed that excessive use of pesticides, fertilizers, and changing farming practices has adversely affected pollinator biodiversity. Therefore, continuous farmland monitoring is required to check flying insects for biodiversity conservation. The idea is to develop a digital sensor network across farmlands for the monitoring of biodiversity at a large scale. In this article, a biodiversity sensor (BS) is developed that can track the movement of flying insects in real-time, along with environmental conditions and updates to the cloud server. The developed sensor is a processor-based Internet of Things (IoT) device, powered by a solar photovoltaic (PV)/battery bank and loaded with a customized Linux operating system (OS) (using Yocto-build). An over-the-air (OTA) update feature has been added to the customized OS, allowing remote management and sensor updates that were previously unavailable in the pre-installed multimedia OS. The sensor can also be managed locally using the device manager portal (DMP), which exposes sensor configuration and data download features over a local Wi-Fi hotspot. The developed sensor has been tested in the field, and the result shows that the BS effectively captures the frames of flying insects and performs surveillance appropriately with an accuracy of more than 90%. A comparison of power efficiency and central processing unit (CPU) utilization is also made between the pre-installed multimedia OS from the manufacturer and the customized OS built using Yocto-build. Results demonstrate that the developed BS is power efficient.