How can radar help us understand the hidden lives of insects?
Insects play a fundamental role in natural and agricultural ecosystems. They pollinate crops, contribute to biodiversity, regulate pest populations, recycle nutrients, and form an essential part of many food webs. At the same time, many insect populations are declining worldwide, highlighting the need for new technologies that enable long-term monitoring of their behaviour and movement in natural environments.
Researchers at the University of Twente are developing a new generation of sensing technologies that combine harmonic radar, computer vision, and artificial intelligence to continuously track individual insects in the field. The aim is to better understand how insects move through complex landscapes while simultaneously developing innovative tools for ecological monitoring.
What do we study?
The experiment investigates how flying insects move through their environment and how their behaviour changes in response to environmental conditions.
Examples of research questions include:
- How do insects search for food and other resources?
- How do they navigate between feeding sites and their nest?
- How do weather, vegetation, and landscape structure influence their movement?
- How can radar and computer vision be combined to automatically detect and track insects?
These experiments provide both new ecological insights and a testbed for developing sensing technologies that can later be applied to other insect species and environmental monitoring applications.
How does it work?
The experiment uses a stationary harmonic radar installed at the FieldLab. Bumblebees from commercially supplied colonies are fitted with tiny passive harmonic tags weighing only a few milligrams. These tags contain no batteries or electronics but reflect a characteristic harmonic signal that allows the radar to identify and track individual insects over distances of up to approximately 100 metres.
To complement the radar measurements, one or more video cameras observe activity around selected nest boxes. These recordings provide ground truth for validating the radar trajectories and support the development of computer vision algorithms capable of automatically detecting and tracking bees.
Why does this matter?
Insects are among the most abundant and diverse groups of animals on Earth, yet many aspects of their movement and behaviour remain largely invisible because of their small size and the difficulty of tracking them in natural environments. Better understanding how insects move through landscapes is essential for addressing challenges in biodiversity conservation, sustainable agriculture, ecosystem management, and environmental monitoring.
While the current experiments focus on bumblebees, the technologies developed within this project are intended for a much wider range of insects. In the future, they could support research on pollinators, invasive species, agricultural pests, and other ecologically important insects, providing researchers and policymakers with better tools to understand and protect insect populations.