Weather Stations for Biodiversity A Comprehensive Approach to an Automated and Modular Monitoring System

About this book

Biodiversity loss is one of the biggest issues facing our planet. While it is clear that the underlying causes, as with climate change, are man-made, documenting and quantifying biodiversity change both in space and time is challenging. A promising approach to tackle this problem is to combine cutting-edge sensor technology with biodiversity informatics, and to harness expert knowledge for the automation of monitoring. Analogous to weather stations, a network of modular and Automated Multisensor stations for Monitoring of species Diversity (AMMODs) can record observations, identify species and transfer data to a database where they can be further analysed. AMMODs make it possible to achieve better temporal and geographical coverage and resolution while requiring little maintenance. The experiences made during a 3-year project using AMMOD stations are presented in Weather Stations for Biodiversity. Several important organism groups were investigated, including plants, insects, birds and mammals. Devices for detecting plant volatile organic compounds, genetic methods, audio recorders, insect and camera traps were tested, as well as solutions for power supply and data management.

Contents

Acknowledgements   9
Preface   11
Contributors   13

1. Introduction   17
2. Smellscapes: automated monitoring of volatile organic compounds in ambient air   31
3. Plant metabarcoding of volumetric air samplers and Malaise traps   69
4. Non-destructive DNA extraction and metabarcoding of arthropod bulk samples: a step-by-step protocol   87
5. Development of an automated Malaise trap multisampler   103
6. Bioacoustic data acquisition and species recognition   119
7. Directional spectrogram (D-SPEC) and signal source preparation: software description and operational guide    159
8. Depth-aware visual monitoring   177
9. The base station   189
10. Data management: connecting the AMMOD base station to the AMMOD data portal   205

Acknowledgments   218

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