Automated Monitoring of Strawberry Pollination

The world’s food security is highly dependent on pollinators with bees being primary members of that community. Bees are declining at an alarming rate due to several factors including use of pesticides and disease. This decline has made pollination via drone an appealing alternative. Initial studies on drones’ effectiveness to pollinate strawberry plants has proved inconclusive. This work helps develop additional field experiments to validate current data as well as how this data can be employed in an open-source format. Using automated entrance monitors, solar-powered acoustic sensors, and computer programs that use the size, symmetry, and color of the strawberries to create models. The technology developed for this study can help pollinator focused researchers in the future as they explore methods for monitoring the entrance of a hive, understanding the consequences of pollinator interactions with strawberry plants, and the use of acoustic monitors in a field to measure the presence of wild bees as well as other pollinators.