Since the introduction of olive fruit fly to California, the California Olive Committee has sponsored olive fruit fly monitoring programs in the Sacramento and southern San Joaquin Valleys. These programs rely on weekly data collection from traditional sticky traps installed over wide geographic areas in each region. The traditional sticky traps provide a snapshot of insect populations over one-week intervals but fail to document temporal bursts of pest activity in real-time. Continuous and/or autonomous monitoring of pest populations would allow growers and pest control advisors to respond to more immediate bursts of insect activity, thus enhancing the timing for insecticide applications.
In 2025, our UCCE Tulare County Orchard Systems program piloted the use of smart trap technology for monitoring olive fruit fly. In collaboration with Becky Wheeler-Dykes, Farm Advisor, UCCE Glenn County, we installed SmartProbes (AIVision Food Inc.) and smart traps (TrapView Inc.) at two olive growing sites in each of Glenn County and Tulare County. These automated devices, capable of detecting and counting the number of olive fruit flies trapped each day, were used in conjunction with the conventional traps to compare the frequency of pest detection between trap types.
Smart traps capture high-resolution images of sticky surfaces and use artificial intelligence image processing software to detect and quantify pest populations. Image data is delivered remotely through a centralized web portal over cellular networks. Smart traps also monitor temperature and relative humidity every five minutes and provide daily averages of weather parameters over designated trapping periods. Additionally, historic pest detection records can be retrieved and viewed on interactive graphs, allowing growers to make comparisons of pest population dynamics between years.
SmartProbes were originally designed to detect and monitor insect pests in storage facilities. In collaboration with Dr. Xongli Pan, Adjunct Professor, UC Davis Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, our research strives to adapt SmartProbe devices for use in orchard systems. SmartProbes use a camera and sensors to capture images of insects and weather data. The settings can be configured to different time intervals. Currently, the images need to be manually uploaded to cloud servers using hotspot or Wi-Fi for analysis by cloud computing and artificial intelligence models. If successful, these SmartProbes can be configured with remote sensing technology to eliminate the need for manual data collection in the field.
Employment of smart device technology in olive fruit fly detection may enable monitoring of the pest over larger geographic areas and provide real-time information on pest populations to the numerous table olive growers throughout the state. Currently, the COC-sponsored program focuses exclusively on monitoring the pest in table olive because of the zero-tolerance threshold for the pest in the black ripe canned olives. The further development of these innovative pest detection techniques may also apply to orchards grown for oil production, a growing industry in California that is dispersed over a wide geographic area in the state including the Temecula region in the south, the central coast, the Central Valley and the Sonoma/Napa and north coast regions.