Monarch butterflies are essential to many ecosystems across North America, as the pollinators migrate from the North to the South each fall.
However, they are an endangered species, with population numbers of 233,394 in January 2024. According to the Xerces Society, this is just 5% of their population from the 1980s.
Some of the driving forces of the decline in the population include habitat loss and insecticides, but they are not federally protected.
Fortunately, a partnership between a drone company and an AI firm could help save the species, according to Inforum.
Botlink, a Fargo-based software and drone company, has partnered with Minneapolis-Saint Paul-based Simple Business Automation and Belgian AI company Radix to create POLLi, a conservation software system designed to track milkweed, a plant vital to the monarch butterfly's reproductive cycle. The work was done in close partnership with Saint Paul-based Monarch Joint Venture, a partnership of state and federal agencies working to protect the butterflies.
Monarch butterflies lay their eggs on milkweed. The hatching caterpillars then use milkweed as a source of food to grow and become butterflies. Milkweed is also vital in producing a toxin that remains in the bodies of monarchs, making them undesirable to predators.
However, a loss of milkweed across the country is one of the contributing factors in the declining population of monarch butterflies.
POLLi works by using high-res cameras attached to drones that can gather images over where they fly, which are then computed with trained AI to map milkweed over large areas. This helps gather data faster than humans in the field.
"What are drones actually good for?" asked Matt Sather, GM of Botlink, per Inforum. "They can go where humans can't, they can get there fast, and now with camera technology, can take incredible pictures."
In 2023, the publication noted Botlink helped identify nearly 80,000 individual milkweed plants.
"So far, it's been great," said Wendy Caldwell, executive director of Monarch Joint Venture. "I think it's going to be a game-changer for how we look at conservation."
Sather hopes that the POLLi technology can have wide-ranging uses beyond the conservation of monarch butterflies. For example, the platform could help U.S. departments, including transportation, defense, and fish and wildlife, to make quicker and better policy decisions.
"What we've created really provides an economical solution to help (people) capture, collect and evaluate at a level that they've never been capable of doing before," said Greg Emerick, the CEO of Simple Business Automation, per Inforum. "There are just so many different things that can be done with the tool. It will help from a sustainability perspective across all sorts of species, and benefit all sorts of different insects and pollinators."
"We've been around the drone market to know that we probably were on top of something unique here," Sather added. "It's going to be an exciting platform. There's a lot of uses — probably as much as your imagination can think of."
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