Hello WILDLABS!

We are very excited and grateful to be recipients of one of the WILDLABS 2025.

I (Tom Knowles, @TomKnowles) am currently a Masters By Research student at the University of Exeter (England). With the support of my supervisor (and WILDLABS project team member) Dr Matthew J Witt (@mjw205), we have been able to develop, build and deploy acoustic drifting buoys. These are capable of recording marine underwater sound, processing the data in-situ and transmitting summarised data to the user in near real-time via Iridium.

Now with the support of Marcus (MRROV.com, @M) and the WILDLABS awards team, we will develop an animal-borne marine acoustic recording tag, which builds from the field-tested buoy. This pioneering acoustic tag will enable new insights into marine vertebrate behaviour, particularly from animals that might move large distances from shore, which can make tag retrieval, for subsequent data analysis, challenging.

Stay tuned for more updates!