According to the World Bank, desert locusts are the most destructive migratory pest globally, with swarms that can travel up to 90 miles daily, containing 80 million locusts, and consuming the same amount of food as 35,000 people. The 2021 locust plague in Africa and Asia highlighted their severe threat to food security, with damages in East Africa and Yemen reaching up to US$8.5 billion in 2020. Traditional models for predicting locust breeding grounds have used environmental and climatic variables like soil moisture, precipitation, wind speed, etc. from different satellite products, but their operationalisation is hampered by the unavailability and inconsistency of these data. This project introduces InstaGeo, the first operational model that predicts desert locust breeding grounds using readily accessible data from Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 satellites.
InstaDeep is a leading AI company on a mission to accelerate the transition to an AI-first world that benefits everyone. Founded in Tunisia, it has become Africa's first AI firm. Headquartered in London, it has a strong presence across Europe and the US. Known as the "DeepMind for B2B," InstaDeep boasts over 100 research publications. Its many applied industrial AI solutions go from collaborations like COVID vaccine development with BioNTech to autonomous train scheduling with Deutsche Bahn.