Biodegradable sensors for large-scale nature monitoring

Sensors have been developed which, after recording data, harmlessly disappear into their surroundings. Until now, these have been focussed on medical applications. In this comment piece, we see how a collaboration of ecologists, material scientists, and robotics experts have come together to explore the same technology, and have looked at how it can be used to achieve large-scale and fully autonomous ecological monitoring. Their research describes a framework for monitoring ecosystems using biodegradable sensors, then explore which kinds of data we can collect as the technology matures further.

The piece, published in Nature last week, goes into further detail on their exciting work. You can read more here: 

Biodegradable sensors are ready to transform autonomous ecological monitoring

Figure 1 showing autonomous deployments of biodegradable sensors

Figure 2 showing future advances in biodegradable sensor technology

Contact:

• Sarab S. Sethi (ecological monitoring) sss70@cam.ac.uk 
• Mirko Kovac (drones/robotics) mirko.kovac@empa.ch 
• Clementine Boutry (medical biodegradable sensors) c.m.f.viellard-boutry@tudelft.nl 

Further information:

• UCL East
• People and Nature Lab
• Division of Biosciences
• Faculty of Life Sciences