PolliCrop: A high-throughput computer vision pipeline for pollinator monitoring in agroecosystems

Abstract

Abstract Flower-visiting insect populations are declining since the 1990s, especially because of the decrease of floral resources in agricultural settings. Mass flowering crops can help increase resource availability, and plant breeding can be directed towards selecting varieties attracting more flower-visiting insects. This requires the implementation of an automated high-throughput phenotyping tool for assessing the attractiveness of plant genotypes to flower-visiting insects. In this study, ( i ) we present a procedure to take standardized images of sunflower heads with camera traps continuously at day and night in the field; ( ii ) we trained two versions of a deep learning model, named PolliCrop, to automatically detect and identify the three insect classes visiting the most sunflower (non- Bombus bees, bumble bees, lepidopterans); ( iii ) we assessed and validated the ability of PolliCrop to correctly predict the true visitation frequencies of the insect classes on three sunflower genotypes; ( iv ) we presented two statistical approaches to compare the insect visitation frequencies between plant genotypes, one including weather variables, and the other one without. One PolliCrop version yielded satisfying performance to correctly detect the three insect classes. In particular, it correctly predicted the insect visitation frequencies on two sunflower genotypes in a range of ±10%. The other PolliCrop version can be useful in certain contexts of images and objectives. PolliCrop can be extended in the future to other crop species by training PolliCrop on new images captured in these crops. The field experimental design to set up for comparing the attractiveness between genotypes is also discussed.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物遺伝型の花への訪花昆虫誘引性を推定する画像取得・深層学習パイプラインを開発し、訪花頻度の予測性能も検証しており、表現型取得法が中心である。

Code and data availability

植物フェノタイピング解析を再現する公開資産であることを、入力本文と直接リンクから確認できなかったため保留しました。

No evidence-backed public reproduction asset is currently recorded.