Scientists tracking the movements of the worst outbreak of locusts in Kenya in 70 years are remaining hopeful that a new tracking program will be able to prevent a second surge of the crop-ravaging insects.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has warned that an imminent second hatch of the insects could threaten the food security of 25 million people across the region as it enters cropping season. Billions of locusts have devastated crops in Somalia, Ethiopia, and countries with fragile food security. A single swarm of locusts can contain up to 150 million locusts per sq km of farmland. The last locust surge in Africa, in 2003–2004, involved two to three generations of insects across 23 African countries, taking about two years to control.
Kenneth Mwangi, a satellite information scientist, based at the Intergovernmental Authority on Development Climate Prediction and Applications Centre, based in Nairobi, said researchers were running a computer model to predict breeding areas that may have been missed by ground monitoring. These areas could become new potential sources of new swarms if not sprayed.
Implying that there are locusts in a general area is not helpful, they need longitude and latitude coordinates.
Keith Cressman, a senior locust forecasting officer at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, thought it would be efficient to create an app that would allow for anyone to collect data like an expert. Borrowing from the PlantVillage app blueprint that uses artificial intelligence to help farmers diagnose problems in their fields, David Hughes, an entomologist at Penn State University, and his colleagues completed the new smartphone app, eLocust3m.
Anyone with a smartphone can use eLocust3m. The app presents photos of locusts at different stages of their life cycles, which helps users determine what they’re looking at in the field. GPS coordinates are automatically recorded and algorithms double-check photos submitted with each entry.
Researchers who are headquartered at Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Central Kenya, conduct regular anti-poaching aerial surveys that could be repurposed to seek out and destroy locust swarms. They also closely communicate with rural communities affected by the insects.
Additionally, there is another program called EarthRanger. Created by a company called Vulcan, EarthRanger compiles and analyzes geographic data ranging from rhino and ranger locations to sensor data and remote imagery. Engineers at Vulcan agreed to customize a version of EarthRanger for locusts, integrating data from the eLocust programs and the computer loggers on aerial pesticide sprayers.
Lewa Conservancy quickly became the headquarters for aerial survey and control across the region. By June 2020, locusts were prevented from spilling into Africa’s Sahel region and west to Senegal.
Although the birth of the 2020 swarms continues to cause damage across East Africa, countries are now better able to combat them — equipped with new technology, 28 aircraft, and thousands of trained government locust trackers. In February alone, locust-patrolling pilots in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia flew the equivalent of three times the circumference of the globe. They sprayed swarms before they had time to mature, stopping the insects from multiplying and spreading into Uganda and South Sudan, as they did last year.
The new approach could create even greater results in tracking, combating, and avoiding future disasters. Dr. Hughes is working with experts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to use locust reports to build models that will predict future plagues. Such insight would allow countries to implement preemptive control strategies that are less environmentally damaging than pesticides.
The same approach, Dr. Hughes said, could also be used to combat other climate-related disasters, such as floods, droughts, and pest outbreaks, as climate change continuously surges on.