Distributed surveillance and decision support ecosystem for control of coconut rhinoceros beetle
Year: 2025
Type: dissertation
Abstract: An introduced population of coconut rhinoceros beetle (CRB; Oryctes rhinoceros) was first discovered on the island of Oahu in late 2013.Adults of this invasive beetle feed on a variety of host plants, including palms, bananas, and sugar cane.As the name of the beetle implies, the preferred host is the coconut palm (Cocos nucifera).CRB feeding results in large boreholes near the crown, introducing a route for infection by a variety of pathogens.CRB damage can easily be recognized by characteristic cuts and notches on fronds as they grow out, and in cases of severe damage the tree can be completely defoliated and die.Surveillance efforts to delineate populations and identify spread poses one of the greatest challenges for control.Currently there are almost two thousand CRB panel traps installed throughout the island of Oahu, scaled back from over three thousand before populations spread to every significant part of the island and control efforts were reorganized to focus on ports of entry to prevent accidental export.Each of these traps is visually inspected at regular intervals (approximately once or twice per month, depending on location) by human operators.This manual trap checking is laborious, expensive with respect to personnel and transportation costs, and time-consuming.Intermittency of trap checks and associated manual data entry and processing to understand geographical distributions also result in delays responding to new outbreaks.Here, we have developed an energy-efficient, automated remote surveillance (CRB-Cam) and data management ecosystem, incorporating machine vision tools to facilitate the monitoring of CRB in highly distributed remote locations.Accurate object detection of beetles in traps, and associated coordinates of traps from on-board GNSS receivers are used to automatically generate maps of daily trap catches which are especially important for rapidly responding to new incipient populations before they can become established in an area.In preliminary field trials with systems uploading trap images hourly, adult CRB exhibited crepuscular behavior, with over 2/3 of observed trap catches occurring at night within 3 hours of civil twilight after sunset, catch rates
Author: Paryavi, Mohsen
Language: English
Subfield: Insect Science
Domain: Life Sciences
SDGs: Life on land, Zero hunger
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7110476875