Contact: Tim Warren, Horticulture

Insects are small and move quickly, making them easy to overlook and challenging to study. Yet they play a crucial, multifaceted role in determining crop viability and yield. Advances in instrumentation and deep learning provide an extraordinary opportunity to automate the study of plant-insect interactions. We will integrate flexible, field-deployable computers with machine learning analysis methods to study how insects move and which crops they target. Our work will address vexing questions in crop science, pest management, dispersal ecology, and pollination biology. Moreover, it will establish a generalizable data collection and analysis framework to support broad conservation and agricultural goals.