Honeybees are like the A-listers of the insect world. They tend to get all the attention, while other superstar pollinators get overlooked.
“Being able to track all pollinators is crucial for getting an accurate picture of ecosystem health,” explains Meg Brennan, founder of insect-monitoring device company Polliknow.
“Pollinating insects are especially valuable because they reflect the health of plant-pollinator relationships, which are essential for ecosystem functioning and stability.
“Currently, collecting detailed insect biodiversity data takes enormous amounts of field time, and you’re only getting a snapshot of what’s happening. Another popular method involves traps, which means killing the insects to monitor them. That’s far from ideal when about 40 per cent of insect pollinator species are currently at risk of extinction.
“The stark reality is that we’ve lost 69 per cent of all biodiversity on earth since the 1970s, yet we still have very little real-time data on what’s actually happening,” she adds.
“What was needed was a way to collect data at scale to monitor and track nature restoration efforts. This was the inspiration behind Polliknow. Our device can detect all types of pollinators, including butterflies and hoverflies, which do tremendous work in maintaining crop production and biodiversity. We can’t just sweep nature out of our way. That’s what has been happening, and the associated problems are becoming evident.”
Polliknow is up and running just over a year and has a number of trial projects on the go, which are generating revenue. Potential customers are international and include landowners, private restoration sites, airports, solar farms and data centres. The company charges an annual fee for its service based on the size of the area to be surveyed.
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“Polliknow can work for any type of organisation that manages land, is serious about increasing biodiversity and wants to track their progress and gather the biodiversity data they need for reporting,” Brennan says.
“We’ve been working with organisations that have a lot of land but are not doing much with it, and now want to manage it better for nature by letting the wildflowers bloom or adding more native species. We’re also beginning to work with biodiversity credit projects as that emerging market takes shape, and helping verify genuine nature uplift over time.”
The Polliknow monitoring device was designed by Brennan, who has a background in biomedical engineering and an interest in nature and insects that goes way back. As a teenager, she was part of a winning team at the Young Scientist exhibition with a project focused on insect trapping. Five years ago, she started keeping bees. “Bees are fascinating - like their own little AI model - and I’ve just got more and more into it,” she says.
The Polliknow device, which is being made here, uses AI and solar-powered ground sensors to continuously monitor an area without disturbing the ecosystem. It gives readings under a number of headings, including species richness and pollinator count and density. “We use vision for identification purposes, and if required, our data can be sent off for verification to an expert in the field,” Brennan says.
The device typically monitors an area for eight hours a day and stays in place for four to six weeks. Brennan says the ultimate aim is to improve its power capacity with a view to leaving it in place for a full season.
Asked how monitoring can be a force for good, Brennan says the data can be used to inform environmental decision-making, whether that relates to grass-cutting management, tree planting or hedgerow enrichment, for example.
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“People think that losing biodiversity doesn’t have an economic impact. It does. Some 75 per cent of crops depend on insect pollinators. They also respond quickly to environmental changes such as habitat loss, pollution and climate shifts, making them an effective early-warning system for ecosystem stress,” says Brennan, whose company is based at Nova UCD, where she is currently participating in the two-year ESA business incubator, which supports Irish start-ups with a connection to space (ESA is a consortium of five Irish academic partners and part of an international space innovation network).
A €5,000 cash prize from the 2024 all-island female entrepreneurs pitching competition gave Brennan enough money to build early prototypes of the Polliknow device, and she put the knowledge she gained in 3D printing, technology and robotics while an innovation fellow at UCD to good use in its design.
Since then, there has been further investment of about €50,000 in financial support from Enterprise Ireland, ESA and Dogpatch Labs. Polliknow has been approved for pre-seed funding of €100,000 from Enterprise Ireland and has plans to raise an additional €400,000 in the short term.
Before starting Polliknow, Brennan spent two years with Accenture working in the pharma, medtech and food sectors. “At Accenture, I was exposed to how things are made at scale, and this complemented my interest in building things,” says Brennan, who designed a device to wash and dry coffee cups as a student, and also sampled start-up culture during her postgraduate studies.
“In the immediate future, Polliknow will continue to focus on pollinator monitoring, but the plan is to expand what we can measure to include rare insects,” she says. “We’d also like to play our part in monitoring the Asian hornet, which has begun causing problems here. It’s crucial to know where their nests are in order to destroy them.
“The biodiversity-monitoring market is only getting started, and there are some fantastic companies measuring biodiversity in various ways,” Brennan adds.
“But for us, many of these companies represent collaboration opportunities rather than competition, as ultimately, we’re all working towards the same goal: getting biodiversity on the balance sheet and helping nature restoration happen at scale.”
