Context: Invasive insect species have the potential to outcompete or predate native species and bring disease. As mobile devices increasingly support biodiversity monitoring, acoustic detection and identification of insects opens up a new avenue to expand the coverage of biodiversity monitoring in the United Kingdom. Such technology is ideally suited for surveillance of invasive species, where the species density is initially low, meaning surveillance effort can be costly and uncertain but still has to be balanced against the potential economic cost of successful invasion. Challenge: A major challenge, in tandem with the great potential offered by mobile acoustic sensing, is the gap between the large volume of raw acoustic recordings generated through passive monitoring and the data processing capacity necessary to promptly extract valuable information from audio contents. Moreover, positive detections must be relayed swiftly to alert research communities, the wider public, and policy makers. Delays can grow excessively in a nationwide mobile acoustic monitoring programme where thousands of mobile devices record sound events as they monitor for invaders. Failing to address this challenge will limit the adoption of a mobile acoustic system for monitoring of invasive species and constrain our ability to deliver timely insights into habitat connectivity and species mobility based on acoustic sensing.