AMMOD: A "Weatherstation" counting species diversity

Description

While since many decades climate researchers are collecting data to document trends and to develop climate scenarios for the future, our planet is losing every year biodiversity, a process for which neither observation programs nor proper documentations exist. According to few case studies, Central Europe has lost since 1990 a large number of populations of insects and birds. However, because detailed biodiversity monitoring does not exist, causal analyses and regional documentations required to convince politicians and other stakeholders are missing.

We intend to combine for the AMMOD project innovative technologies and to adapt them to automatize the detection of species, in analogy to continuous measurements achieved with autonomous weather stations. For this purpose we are developing the following modules:

• Automatized sampling of insects, pollen and airborne spores für the identification via DNA barcodes (see GBOL project: www.bolgermany.de)
• Automatized image recognition for birds, mammals, nocturnal insects (“moth scanner”) (http://www.inf-cv.uni-jena.de/fgvcbiodiv )
• Automatized bioacoustics species identification (e.g. for birds, bats, grasshoppers)
• Atomatized analysis of biogenic scents (“smellscape analysis”).

Pilot studies are currently being prepared.

Location