Between 16 and 20 June 2025, the 28th edition of the Italian National Congress of Entomology took place in the city of Siena. With more than 500 participants from Italy and abroad in attendance, the event facilitated important discussions on the development of this scientific discipline in the country and beyond. 

FORSAID was represented at the Congress by two of its consortium members. One was Prof. Dr. Rudolf Meier, Team Leader for one of the project’s institutional partners, Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. In his capacity as plenary speaker, he gave an insightful presentation titled “From unknown to described and identifiable: Tackling insect diversity with robots, megabarcoding and machine learning”. The showcase zoomed in on technologies for insect identification, including the DiversityScanner and the Entomoscope. 

Fellow FORSAID member Valerio Caruso, research assistant at the University of Padua, was also featured in the Congress programme. He presented an application of the Entomoscope for beetle identification in his engaging talk “Image-based recognition using advanced neural networks can aid surveillance of Agrilus jewel beetles”.

Both these contributions illustrated the growing impact of artificial intelligence and automation in advancing entomological research and biodiversity monitoring, a tendency that is informing FORSAID’s own exploration of innovations in pest detection. You can find out more about the objectives at the core of the project here.