A Comprehensive Pest Monitoring System for Brown Marmorated Stink Bug

The invasive insect brown marmorated stink bug (BMSB) is an emerging pest of global importance, as it is destroying fruits and seeds, having caused estimated damages of € 588 million to crops in 2019 in Northern Italy alone. An open challenge is to improve monitoring of BMSB in order to be able to deploy countermeasures more efficiently and to increase consumer confidence in the end product. The Horizon 2020 Haly.ID project seeks to reduce or eliminate dependence on conventional monitoring tools and practices, such as traps, baits, visual inspections, sweep netting, and tree beating. In their place, the project proposes the use of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and Internet of Things (IoT) solutions for monitoring the insect population and investigates novel methods for enhancing the quality of fruit in the market. In this work, we focus on the novel autonomous IoT insect monitoring system consisting of multiple innovative solutions for BMSB monitoring and trusted data management developed in Haly.ID. In particular, this article describes the challenges faced when integrating and deploying this monitoring system consisting of those different parts and aims at presenting valuable “lessons learned” for the realization of future deployments. We show that massive over-provisioning of power supply and network speed allows to adapt the system at run-time reflecting changing project requirements, and to conduct experiments remotely. At the same time, over-provisioning introduces new weak points impacting the system reliability, such as cables that can be unplugged or damaged.