[frontierkodiak]

We don’t have the data to make much more than directional claims re: macro trends in insect biodiversity. Ecological monitoring is tedious and labor-intensive; insects are simply too minute, too diverse, and too numerous to be surveilled at scale. Scale is necessary to make multi-decadal claims across millions of taxa; this is probably why some of the most rigorous studies^1 have produced findings that complicate the idea of an insect armageddon.

I’m working on a tool to make insect (focused esp. on pollinators) monitoring 10,000x cheaper. We do not currently understand the scale of insect declines, much less are we able to design targeted interventions. In the past decades, mammalian and avian declines were largely reversed, mostly thanks to ambitious multiyear monitoring efforts that enabled limited conservation resources to be allocated efficiently.

We should replicate this model with insects. I plan to make this possible by radically reducing the cost of data.

I’ve been toying with this idea for a few years, but I finally made the leap to building my startup^2 full-time a few months back (coming from entomology/ecology). Hoping for an alpha release & demo study this summer.

I'm happy to chat with anyone interested. Especially interested to meet those working and funding in this space.

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-020-1269-4 2. https://polli.ai Note: This site is austere (I blame CUDA troubles for stealing my time this month). Expect something more representative by April.