While ecological farming aims for sustainable production with the least impact on the environment, a natural consequence of that is the presence of pests. A lack of biodiversity in the natural prey of the pests leads to significant farm losses and even chemical interventions. A bio-positive food production system requires a balanced interplay of pest and prey, for a successful production system. However, quantifying the impact of a bio-diverse ecosystem on pest management and farm production is a major challenge in ecological farming systems. The main issue being on the measurement of biodiversity. It is often too time-consuming, too expensive, or both.
In the last decade, automated ecoaccoustic surveying has emerged as relevant technology for large-scale monitoring of natural as well as urban habitats. Acoustic recording devices facilitate environment monitoring over lengthy temporal and spatial scales, making acoustic monitoring a relatively economically accessible method compared to traditional surveying and bio-diversity monitoring approaches. The automatization of such systems would yield continuous and inexpensive data, allowing actions to be adjusted on a micro-temporal scale. For that matter machine learning, including deep learning, is being increasingly applied to acoustic data, to automatically identify a range of sounds, from different birds species, to amphibians, grasshoppers and humans.
To make the task of measuring biodiversity in farming systems swifter and more tangible from a producer perspective, we will use ecoaccoustic monitoring as a tool to quantify the impact of a bio-diverse ecosystem on pest management, and finally on-farm production, in ecological farming systems.
A biodiverse farming ecosystem must include natural counter-balances against such pests and producers must be able to access this measurement to be able to include it in the production process. A direct intended impact of this project is to design automated systems for acoustic biodiversity monitoring and connect that to farm yield. The aim is to quantify the benefits of a balanced bio-positive system against an imbalanced one.
This project works in close collaboration with Prof. Lessando Gontijo from the Universidade Federal de Viçosa in Brazil. For more information about this project in Brazil, click here.
Check out the full "Biodiversity-Positive Food System" program of WUR here.
BSc or MSc students who are interested in joining the fieldwork (or data analyses), please contact the respective spokesperson (see below).
We are currently looking for MSc students to join us in the field in Brazil!
Do you want to do your MSc thesis working on this multidisciplinary, applied research, learn how eco-acoustics can be used as a tool for nature-positive food production, and are willing to join us in the field in Brazil?
Do not hesitate and apply by contacting Filipe Cunha (filipe.cunha@wur.nl) or Lysanne Snijders (lysanne.snijders@wur.nl).
