Pherosensor-toolbox: a Python package forBiology-Informed Data Assimilation

Insect pests are a major threat to agricultural systems (Oerke, 2006), leading to intensive use of pesticides for crop protection with unsustainable drawbacks on the environment, biodiversity, and human health.Most insects produce pheromones for conspecific communication, making pheromone sensors an effective tool for early specific detection of pests, in order to reduce pesticide use within the context of precision agriculture (Gebbers & Adamchuk, 2010).Pherosensor-toolbox is a Python package containing numerical tools for pheromone sensor data assimilation to infer the position of emitting pest insects.It contains specific tools to model pheromone propagation and solve the corresponding inverse problem to determine emitters' position taking into account the environmental context (wind, landscape, vegetation).A specific focus is put on the integration of biological knowledge of pest behavior during inference.