Project set to Support Research, Capacity Building.

According to Prof. Stephen Wolthusen NTNU, and PI AdEMNEA Project, NTNU is the project lead, but the University of Bergen in Norway is a participating partner in the meteorology area. Others are Makerere as a co-lead, DIT in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and the University of Juba. “Although most of the interactions have been electronic, we will have physical interactions sooner or later,” he added.

PROJECT GOALS.

i) Research Capacity Building: The project seeks to support interdisciplinary research and capacity building for research and supervision by funding and co-supervising MSc and PhD projects, mobility support and fieldwork support.

ii) Development of sensing platforms.

iii) Managing the power of those platforms.

iv) Use of machine learning and artifi cial intelligence to bring the data together: The highlevel goal is to design, develop and deploy a flexible network of data gathering and monitoring stations for meteorological data as well as a wide variety of data including audio, image and video data. There is also field reports and telemetry data; integrating both existing sensing platforms and customised components for specifi c research areas.

The application domain will support entomologists to enhance pollinator protection (bees) and pest control (fruit flies) in a changing environment based on timely data and with machine learning support. We aim to build on the work previously done in the area of weather sensing and integrate it with a number of other sensors; either drone-based, static or as carried out by field workers.

We will pull together a large array of sensor data that will help entomologists and other scientists in the application domain to understand how pests and pollinators are responding to changing environmental stressors.