New Advanced Insect Trapping Technology Introduced

Dec 07, 2016

Spensa Technologies, a Purdue-affiliated precision agriculture technology company, announces Z-Trap 1, the company's first fully commercial hardware device intended to reduce costly and time-consuming manual crop scouting.

The new commercially available hardware product can seamlessly integrate with the Spensa AP, Spensa's comprehensive agronomic platform, to allow growers and agronomists to record pest data and keep track of lure life from a smartphone or browser. The technology also shows visualization of pest populations geographically so changes can be monitored over time.

"After years of testing and perfecting the Z-Trap 1, we are incredibly proud to introduce the product to the ag industry," said Johnny Park, founder and CEO of Spensa Technologies. "Spensa is on a mission to create novel technologies that will radically revolutionize the industry and foster environmental responsibility. We believe the Z-Trap 1, in addition to other technologies we are developing, represents a giant leap toward achieving this goal."

Z-Trap 1 provides advantages over manual trapping, including reduced labor costs and real-time monitoring for more precise timing of insect flights. In collaboration with agricultural researchers, Spensa began field-testing the trap in 2010, and has tested more than 300 traps in fields across the United States, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand. Z-Trap 1 includes new features such as a cellular modem and changes to the bioimpedance sensor and detection algorithms to improve catch rate and reduce susceptibility to false positives.

Source: purdue.edu

Video: Spring 2026 weather outlook for Wisconsin; What an early-arriving El Niño could mean

Northeast Wisconsin is a small corner of the world, but our weather is still affected by what happens across the globe.

That includes in the equatorial Pacific, where changes between El Niño and La Niña play a role in the weather here -- and boy, have there been some abrupt changes as of late.

El Niño and La Niña are the two phases of what is collectively known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO for short. These are the swings back and forth from unusually warm to unusually cold sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean along the equator.

Since this past September, we have been in a weak La Niña, which means water temperatures near the Eastern Pacific equator have been cooler than usual. That's where we're at right now.

Even last fall, the long-term outlook suggested a return to neutral conditions by spring and potentially El Niño conditions by summer.

But there are some signs this may be happening faster than usual, which could accelerate the onset of El Niño.

Over the last few weeks, unusually strong bursts of westerly winds farther west in the Pacific -- where sea surface temperatures are warmer than average -- have been observed. There is a chance that this could accelerate the warming of those eastern Pacific waters and potentially push us into El Niño sooner than usual.

If we do enter El Nino by spring -- which we'll define as the period of March, April and May -- there are some long-term correlations with our weather here in Northeast Wisconsin.

Looking at a map of anomalously warm weather, most of the upper Great Lakes doesn't show a strong correlation, but in general, the northern tiers of the United States do tend to lean to that direction.

The stronger correlation is with precipitation. El Niño conditions in spring have historically come with a higher risk of very dry weather over that time frame, so this will definitely be a transition we'll have to watch closely as we move out of winter.