Opportunities and challenges for monitoring terrestrial biodiversity in the robotics age

With biodiversity loss escalating globally, a step-change is needed in our capacity to accurately monitor species populations across ecosystems. Robotic andAUtonomous systems (RAS) offer technological solutions that may significantly advance terrestrial biodiversity monitoring, but this potential is yet to be considered systematically. We used a modified Delphi technique to synthesise knowledge from 98 biodiversity and 31 RAS experts who identified the major methodological barriers that currently hinder monitoring, and explored the opportunities and challenges that RAS offer to overcome these barriers. Biodiversity experts identified four barrier categories: site access, species/individual identification, data handling/storage and power/network availability. Robotics experts highlighted technologies that could overcome these barriers and identified the developments needed to facilitate RAS-basedAUtonomous biodiversity monitoring. Some existing RAS could be optimised relatively easily to survey species, but would require development to monitor more ‘difficult’ taxa and be robust enough to work in uncontrolled conditions within ecosystems. Other nascent technologies (e.g., novel sensors, biodegradable robots) need accelerated research. Overall, it was felt that RAS could lead to major progress in monitoring terrestrial biodiversity by supplementing, rather than supplanting, existing methods. Transdisciplinarity needs to be fostered between biodiversity and RAS experts, so future ideas and technologies can be co-developed effectively.