Spotted lanternflies are an invasive insect species that was first spotted in the United States in 2014 and can do major damage to trees, crops, and other plants. Now, an 18-year-old high school student from New Jersey has come up with an innovative solution to keep them at bay, Smithsonian Magazine reported.
Selina Zhang has named her invention "ArTreeficial." It's a solar-powered, self-cleaning, artificial-intelligence-driven, umbrella-like "tree" that attracts the insects and then zaps them to death.
To make ArTreeficial work, Zhang personally took over 500 photos of spotted lanternflies in the wild and logged them into a database, which she used to inform and program an AI model that can recognize the lanternflies and differentiate them from other types of insects.
"I didn't want to just rely on internet pictures, which are often designed to focus on specific aspects of the spotted lanternfly, such as its vibrant red wings, or clusters of them together," Zhang said. "Part of making a good AI model is having good data to train it with. My field observations and pictures give the model a more comprehensive understanding of what it might encounter."
In addition, she specially designed the mesh on the device with a double layer to more effectively ensnare the insects, and used ultrasound to release an incense made from the essence of tree of heaven, one the spotted lanternflies' known host plants in its native China.
"It was amazing to see it working," Zhang said. "It was such a lightbulb moment when I pushed the internet on, tested [the net] with a screwdriver, and it gave a spark. Seeing it come to life was an incredible feeling."
Zhang hopes that farmers can use her invention to help protect their crops and, more broadly, said that she "would love to develop ArTreeficial as a general paradigm, not just for spotted lanternflies, but as a general approach that we can use toward technologies in pest control."
For her efforts, Zhang was named one of 40 finalists in the Regeneron Science Talent Search, a prestigious science and math competition for high school seniors.
Considering that previous efforts to mitigate exploding spotted lanternfly populations have focused mainly on telling people to squash whichever ones they happen to see on the sidewalk, ArTreeficial seems like a pretty big step up.
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