A Sensor-Based Approach to Studying Animal Behavior in Light Pollution Research

Sebastián Andrés Bustos Vásquez

@SebastianBustos
| He

Electronics engineer student from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile (PUCV) starting his thesis

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Greetings, I'm Sebastian!

I am share with you a project that I will need help on some aspects: "Development of a system for recording animal activity and behavior based on sensors, for use in light pollution research."

My project aims to address this gap by developing an autonomous system for recording variables (light, images, sound, temperature) that can be deployed for field measurements. The animals commonly present are birds, geese, and insects, which I will focus my measurements on. For that, I'm searching sensors and protocols to made this autonoums system functional (e.g. an AudioMoth to measure bird songs):

Develop a design for a multivariable recording system.
Implement a unique synchronization protocol, despite WIfi or Bluetooth.

This is intended to help keep nature present in the botanical garden due to the fire that occurred in Valparaíso, February 2024.

Looking forward to your thoughts and feedback!

Sebastian Bustos

Kim Hendrikse

@kimhendrikse

I'm a software developer. I have open source projects in practical object detection and alerting that is well suited for poacher detection and a Raspberry Pi based sound localizing ARU project

25 February 2024 1:15pm

Will this be autonomous with lots of power available or does it have to be very low power such that it’s restricted to micro controller implementation?

What are the requirements for synchronisation ? Lots of data or very small amounts of data ?

Over what distances are you wanting to synchronise?

Sebastián Andrés Bustos Vásquez

25 February 2024 1:15pm

Thanks for helping me!

For now, I'll be testing with mains power (220V). The final prototype needs to be functional using solar panel.

The main system will be a Raspberry Pi, as the Brain of this project, receiving and storage all the measurements from the other devices, controlling the system. The measurement devices will be a microcontroller (still searching for which one to use) with differents sensor, such Lux sensor like TSL2561 or 2591, AudioMoth to record animals sounds, temperature and some other measurements.

For synchronization, must be effective, because the measurements must be or have the same time, so the storage data from differents devices can be grouped by it's timestamp and have full control for animals and fauna. So, probably it will be a lot of data per day.

The distance between each devices I haven't study yet, consider 20 meters within each device.

Lars Holst Hansen

25 February 2024 1:15pm

Beware that the AudioMoth in itself will drift. It can be hooked up with a GPS to allow for GPS time synchronization, though.

https://www.openacousticdevices.info/gps-sync

Kim Hendrikse

25 February 2024 1:15pm

Unless you are planning on making a mesh network between nodes then the total distance spanning the location of all the nodes is important to know, not just the intra node distance.

If you have a Raspberry Pi as a main master node then you could install my sbts-aru project as a base project and you would get a sub-microsecond master time base by default as well as the GPS synchronizes the main system time with typically less than 0.1 microsecond, and SD card corruption resilience due to the in-memory overlayFS architecture.

If the total distance was 20m across all nodes, then the approach above could also combined the audio gathering capability as the sbts-aru project does audio logging as it would be within 20m of an audiomoth anyway, then you also have time-synchonized audio. If the distance is spanning 100m for example and it's just the intranode distance that is 20m then everything is somewhat different with respect to synchronization.