From 29 June to 3 July, MAMBO participated in the XIII European Congress of Entomology (ECE 2026) that took place in Tours, France. The event welcomed more than 1,400 participants from across Europe – mainly members of the academic community – with a shared goal to study and preserve the world of insects.

Throughout the event, MAMBO’s project materials were displayed at the dissemination booth of our project partner Pensoft. The Congress participants took a keen interest in MAMBO’s policy brief, outlining MAMBO’s innovations for supporting the monitoring of pollinators across Europe, titled “Integration of novel technology in pollinator monitoring”. The policy brief lists three policy recommendations for the EU Pollinator Monitoring Scheme:

1. Support MAMBO technologies for future adoption into transnational monitoring: MAMBO’s technologies, especially insect camera traps, can be implemented into research infrastructures and EU-wide monitoring.

2. Expand reference databases and benchmark data sets: With the help of funding initiatives, MAMBO can establish reference databases to benchmark image and sound recognition models for pollinator monitoring

3. Develop infrastructure for scalable monitoring: Investments and support are needed for cloud-based virtual labs to process sensor data and for the standardisation of data formats and workflows across Member States.

Additionally, during the ECE 2026, MAMBO’s coordinator Toke T. Høye gave a couple of presentations. 

During his first presentation, titled “InsectAI – Using Image-based AI for Insect Monitoring & Conservation”, he introduced the InsectAI COST action that will support insect monitoring and conservation at a national and continental scale to understand and counteract widespread insect decline. During his second presentation on the topic of “Automated insect monitoring with camera traps is transforming ecological understanding”, he explained how insect camera traps, deep learning models, and statistics can improve biodiversity assessments. Høye was also a moderator of the session “INSECTS & SOCIETY - AI and machine learning”, which focused on AI biodiversity monitoring and species identification.

ECE 2026 was a great opportunity for exploring the diversity of insect species, evolutionary strategies, and insect-human interactions. With its rich program of lectures, symposia, and poster sessions, the Congress stimulated interdisciplinary dialogue on a variety of topics from the molecular scale to global policy.