Insect monitoring for water authorities
Objective, repeatable data on insect life in your management area — without manual counting.
Water authorities and water boards that want to use insect monitoring for nature-friendly bank management, EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) targets and biodiversity all come up against the same limitation: counting insects by hand is expensive, labor-intensive and hard to repeat. The DIOPSIS insect camera automates the process entirely.
Why insect monitoring for water authorities
In the Netherlands, water authorities manage thousands of kilometers of banks, nature-friendly zones and watercourses. In these areas, insects are a sensitive indicator of water quality and ecological recovery, and they play a role in targets relating to the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) and biodiversity. Until now, that insight has relied on manual sampling: labor-intensive, limited in time and place, and hard to compare objectively from year to year.
Automated measurement with DIOPSIS
The DIOPSIS insect camera photographs insects fully automatically. The device can be set up in five to ten minutes by one person and sends the images to a central server over 4G. There, an image recognition model — managed by Naturalis — identifies and counts the insects by species or species group.
For a water authority, this means you collect consistent measurements at multiple sites at once, throughout an entire season, without someone having to go into the field every week. The data is objective, repeatable and comparable between sites and years.
What you gain
With continuous, standardized insect data you can demonstrate the effect of management measures, such as adapted mowing management or the creation of nature-friendly banks. You build up a multi-year dataset that reveals trends that remain invisible with spot sampling. And you can back up policy and accountability reporting with figures instead of estimates.
Practical in the field
The camera is designed for outdoor use: a waterproof battery housing, a solar panel for autonomous power and a folding insect screen. You adjust settings such as photo frequency and lighting times remotely through the web portal. You can buy or lease cameras — see buy or lease.
Setting up insect monitoring in your management area?
We are happy to discuss monitoring sites, the monitoring season and how to turn the data into reports for your board.