TDC NET’s Butterfly Cameras Still Need Another Summer

TDC NET and Ericsson put solar camera boxes on a Zealand heath to count two endangered blues. TDC NET’s 2025 annual report then said the 2025 flying season was not enough to name those species with confidence.

The boxes sit on land the Danish network owner has already booked toward a 2030 nature target. The second move is the one that matters for anyone copying the pledge: a 5G camera stack is being asked to turn a land percentage into a species count, and the first summer did not close that gap.

TDC NET Pledged 30 Percent of Its Own Land

TDC NET, Denmark’s main mobile and fibre infrastructure company, adopted a board-level target in 2023 to preserve 30% of its own land by 2030, aligned with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. The 2024 annual report puts that estate at 3.2 km² spread across more than 6,000 sites, a footprint of masts, technical buildings and leftover ground rather than a nature reserve.

The kickoff site is Skamlebæk Radio in Odsherred Municipality, North-West Zealand, 30.6 hectares inside the EU Natura 2000 network and under section 3 of the Danish Nature Conservation Act. Work in 2024 included a hay sled on 3.4 hectares, a shared grazing enclosure of 21 hectares (14 of them on TDC NET land) that took six cows in June, and a heather project that started in December to push back Scotch broom. About DKK 250,000 in operating spend went into that first year. The books closed 2024 at 9.6% of the 30% target, which is the Skamlebæk parcel counted against the whole estate.

In 2025 the company added 11 hectares at Skagen in Northern Jutland, also Natura 2000, and reported 12.6% preserved land. Icelandic horses replaced the cows on the Zealand grassland. A bioblitz with UNESCO Global Geopark Odsherred and the municipal nature team had already logged more than 300 species on the Skamlebæk ground as a baseline. Biologists from Dalgas later found 43 plant species and 21 animal and insect species on the Skagen site and named five focus species, including the sand lizard and Plebejus idas.

THE 30 BY 30 LAND LEDGER

Six percentage points remain unidentified on the 2025 roadmap. The Danish Biodiversity Council’s figure, which TDC NET repeats, is that only 1.6% of Denmark’s land is protected nature, so the company is measuring itself against its own square metres, not the national gap.

Beehive Boxes Send Pictures Over 5G

The camera trial is how TDC NET tries to show that those hectares are doing more than sitting idle. Ericsson’s 2026 case on the project describes solar-powered field units, on-site AI, and a 5G link into a cloud dashboard, built so a power cut does not kill the record. TDC NET’s own filing calls the housings beehive-like boxes with cameras, run on solar, and watched through the short flying season.

How the Camera Boxes Identify a Butterfly

Cameras keep shooting; a first model asks if a butterfly is in the frame, a second model names the species, and the packet goes over TDC NET’s 5G network to a dashboard where staff can review and check IDs. That two-step filter is the whole claim that a radio site can produce a species list without a daily walk.

THE FIELD PIPELINE

• Capture: Solar field units keep cameras running so a short June to August flight window is not missed between staff visits.
• Filter then name: AI first decides whether a butterfly is present, then a second model tries to name the species before anything is stored as an observation.
• Review: The record is sent over 5G to a cloud dashboard where people still validate species and watch the site over time.

Ericsson presents that loop as a replicable model for other habitats. TDC NET presents it as a proof of concept that still needs hardware and software work, wider coverage, and deeper analytics before it can carry biodiversity reporting.

Why These Two Blues

The cameras are not counting every wing on the heath. The target species are Plebejus argus, the silver-studded blue, and Plebejus idas, two small lycaenids that use heather and are easy to mix up even in a net. TDC NET says both are endangered on this ground and that heather restoration, begun in 2024, is the habitat work the trial is supposed to score.

The wider Skamlebæksletten mosaic, a 35 ha stretch of dry grassland and heath that Den Danske Naturfond has helped manage, has 38 butterfly species on the slette, including argus blue and idas blue, plus pearl-bordered fritillary and violet copper. Volunteers and the municipality have been pulling broom and burning old heather there for years. TDC NET’s radio parcel sits in that same Natura 2000 patchwork. The cameras inherit a landscape that was already in moderate condition from overgrowth, not an empty field waiting for a gadget.

Heather is the hinge. If broom and grass close the canopy, the blues lose the plant they need to breed. If heather returns, a camera that cannot split argus from idas still cannot tell TDC NET whether the right insect came back.

One Flying Season Did Not Close the Books

The flying season for these blues is short, June to August, which is the whole data window. TDC NET designed the proof of concept in 2025, ran it through that window, and wrote the result into the annual report in plain language.

While the solution did track butterflies in the area, we need to finetune the solution to ensure better accuracy in tracking the right species in scope. We have therefore decided to extend the project to include one more flying season before we draw any final conclusions.

TDC NET, Annual Report 2025

That sentence is the operational fact behind Ericsson’s later case study. The boxes saw butterflies. They did not yet see Plebejus argus and Plebejus idas cleanly enough to sign off. The company said it would spend one more flying season on the problem. Early results, it added, still “validate the approach.”

Field computer vision has the same bruise in published tests. Models trained on neat insect photos lose precision on real vegetation, rare species, and lookalikes. A 2023 PLOS study using YOLOv5 on time-lapse cameras reached 92.7% precision and 93.8% recall across nine common European insects, then warned that performance would drop on new plants and backgrounds. Interval photography studies find order-level IDs hold up while species-level IDs fall well behind a person standing at the flower. Argus and idas are exactly the pair that would stress a second model.

A radio mast on the same heath also walks into a public argument that already blames 5G for empty insect air. The boxes do not settle that argument. They do mean the landowner now has a second job: prove the insects on its own ground without asking people to trust a press image of a blue wing.

The Official Count Is Still a Walk

While TDC NET debugs a camera, EU law is building a different measuring stick. The Nature Restoration Regulation entered into force on 19 August 2024. Article 10 binds Member States to reverse pollinator decline by 2030 and then show an increasing trend, checked at least every six years. On 19 September 2025 the Commission adopted a delegated act that Member States are to run as the EU Pollinator Monitoring Scheme, at the latest by 16 December 2026.

That method is a walk. Member States collect annual data on bees, hoverflies, butterflies and day-active moths on 2 km by 2 km sites, using transect walks in a set observation period, with extra targeted work for critically endangered species. The grassland butterfly index is one of three farm-ecosystem indicators in Article 11, of which each country must pick at least two and push toward an increasing trend by 2030.

THE POLLINATOR SCOREBOARD

• EU grassland index: The European Environment Agency records a 47% drop in grassland butterflies from 1991 to 2024 across 17 typical species, with more than 3,800 standardised transects counted in 2024.
• Species under pressure: The Commission’s pollinators page states that 1 in 3 bee, butterfly and hoverfly species is in decline and 1 in 10 bee and butterfly species is threatened with extinction, while around 4 in 5 crop and wild flowering plants need animal pollination.
• Legal clock: Countries must have the pollinator monitoring method by December 2026, and they filed draft national restoration plans on 1 September 2026, with finals due within a year.

None of that makes TDC NET’s boxes illegal or useless. It does mean a corporate dashboard of camera IDs will not, on its own, feed the index Brussels will score. The walks still set the official trend. The cameras are a private overlay for a landowner that has to show, in its own report, that 12.6% is not just a fence line.

Restored Ground Often Comes Back Empty

The reason a telco would buy a second summer of cameras is that restored land often fails the species test. A 2025 University of Copenhagen study of Danish wetlands restored after 2000 found species richness still well below near-natural sites, with about one third of the species missing, including the rarer plants and mosses. Marta Baumane, at the Department of Biology, said waiting another 20 years is unlikely to close that gap while nitrogen and dry river channels stay in place.

Danish dry heath is under the same grind. Pin-point monitoring from 2004 to 2021 across 102 dry heathlands found heather, wavy hair-grass and black crowberry losing cover, while purple moor-grass gained. Those three declining plants are the engineers of the habitat. When they thin out, a butterfly that needs heather does not return because a report declared the hectare “preserved.”

TDC NET’s own KPI is land-use change and better management, not a butterfly index. The 2024 filing is explicit that the 30% target used no biodiversity offsets and did not apply an ecological threshold. Horses, broom crews and a hay sled can change the look of 30.6 hectares in a season. They cannot, by themselves, prove that argus and idas bred. That is the job the boxes were hired to do, and it is why a miss on species ID is not a small software bug.

Other landowners are already buying machine checks on restoration claims. Brunei’s mangrove programme uses AI checks on mangrove planting to verify that trees went in the ground. The Danish boxes are the same product class on a heath: evidence for a pledge, produced by a model, still waiting on a human to say the species is right.

Two Radio Sites and a Long Queue

TDC NET is trying to turn the Skamlebæk playbook into a club. Its public environment pages ask other landowners to join a group of 30 companies that would restore 30% of their own ground by 2030, with TDC NET offering knowledge and tools. The 2025 roadmap still has 12 locations under review for 11 percentage points, and 6 points with no site attached.

THE COUNTING CALENDAR

1. 2023: The board approves a target to preserve 30% of TDC NET land by 2030.
2. 2024: Skamlebæk Radio comes onto the books at 30.6 hectares, cows graze, broom is cut, a bioblitz logs more than 300 species, and preserved land hits 9.6%.
3. 2025: Horses take the grassland, heather work continues, Skagen adds 11 hectares, camera boxes run their first flying season, and preserved land reaches 12.6%.
4. 2026: TDC NET schedules a second flying season; Ericsson publishes the 5G case; EU states file draft restoration plans on 1 September.

The 2026 flying season closed in August. Neither company has posted a public tally for Plebejus argus or Plebejus idas. Draft restoration plans are now with the Commission. The boxes will have to earn the next number the same way the cows and horses did, on the ground, species by species.