Wildlife tracking technologies have already massively advanced our understanding of the natural world, from uncovering previously mysterious migration patterns and key movement corridors to demonstrating the impacts of anthropogenic pressures and climate change. Recent advances in the development of technologies for collecting and transmitting biologging data have unlocked the potential for fine-scale data collection at a near-global scale, which when integrated with remotely sensed environmental data offers an unprecedented biological lens into ecosystem health and environmental change (Jetz et al. 2022).
New technologies on the horizon include small satellites like CubeSats, which are being investigated by NASA, the ICARUS Initiative's satellite system, and a variety of other ventures aiming to improve the coverage, accuracy, and capacity of wildlife tracking data collection. Combined with the increased availability of high-resolution environmental data and analytical developments in movement modeling, these advancements are empowering movement ecologists to ask previously unanswerable or unimaginable questions. It’s clear that this discipline sits at the precipice of major breakthroughs that could revolutionize our understanding of animal movement and the natural world.
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You’re invited to the WILDLABS Variety Hour, a monthly event that connects you to conservation tech's most exciting projects, research, and ideas. We can't wait to bring you a whole new season of speakers and...
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The primary focus of the research is to explore how red deer movements, space use, habitat selection and foraging behaviour change during the wolf recolonization process.
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The Wildlife Restoration Foundation is hiring a Conservation Technology Intern
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In the last article of my series examining how people find biologging tech for their projects, I spoke with Annkathrin Sharp, a Programme Officer at Fauna & Flora about how her experience choosing DIY Biologgers to...
14 December 2023
In the penultimate article in my series examining how people find biologging tech for their projects, I spoke with Matthew Stanton about developing custom biologging technology for studying koala behaviour.
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In the third article examining how people find biologging tech for their projects, I spoke with Samantha Andrzejaczek with the Hopkins Marine Station and Jessica Rudd and Lucy Hawkes of the University of Exeter about...
30 November 2023
TagRanger® is a state-of-the-art wildlife finding, monitoring and tracking solution for research, conservation and environmental professionals. With superior configurability for logging data, reporting location and...
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April 2024
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June 2024
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November 2023
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PhD Opportunity - Movement through space and time, realistic movement for species abundance methods
20 October 2023 12:33pm
Marine Flyways - Seabird Tracking Database
20 October 2023 12:23pm
To celebrate #WMBD, BirdLife is excited to share the newly identified Marine Flyways!! Seabird tracking data were shared by over 60 researchers from 48 long-distance migratory species and have revealed SIX MarineFlyways. They've created an awesome animation to go along with it!
What Biologgers are you using?
30 August 2023 10:44am
7 September 2023 11:00am
Ah! It's great to find out about your tags - great video, thanks for sharing. We'd love to hear from some of your users about their experiences with your tags! Would you be able to share the poll with your user community?
12 October 2023 12:24pm
Hey Stephanie,
Thanks a lot! Sorry I missed your message but of course I can ask our users about their experience with sensors!
Unravelling freshwater turtle activity with an open source, low-cost accelerometer
6 October 2023 1:04pm
Best Temperature/ Humidity Dataloggers
24 April 2023 1:30pm
11 September 2023 2:49pm
Heya Nick - ooh cool! We thought about the Kestrels but I had heard about some of the problems with them maxing out at 100. Have gone for HOBO Pro V2s
11 September 2023 2:51pm
Heya Matthew cheers for providing a comparison! We went with HOBO Pro V2s which are more expensive but have been working well so far!
23 September 2023 6:14am
Makes sense if you have the cash...
GPS-GSM Collar Recommendations?
6 September 2023 6:36pm
14 September 2023 6:23am
You are most welcome! You would have to either have them custom make collars to fit hyenas OR DIY by fitting the Milsar GSM devices to collars of your own liking - but I guess you also prefer to have drop-offs - something the Milsars do not have!
14 September 2023 6:30am
You are welcome! An alternative would be to look into the GSM options from Africa Wildlife Tracking (https://awt.co.za/product). I have no personal expereince with them at all but they are likely to have experience with hyena collars.
BTW. The internal drop-off option in the Vectronic-Aerospace collars is super reliable.
23 September 2023 6:07am
Hi Lars,
One of the problems you identified with your Milsar units was the antenna being worn off. This was solved in our units by the antenna being epoxied into an abrasion resistant heavy plastic (a single piece that was also the mount and provided extra protection on the ends). I'd still want to add more of this material around the edges of the solar panels on a hyena, but for what it is worth I tried one of the koala units on our 17 kg dog for a month or so and it didn't seem to take any worse wear than it did on the koala. Any solar GPS system is going to need a counter weight to keep the GPS and solar panels skyward, so that is where I would incorporate a release mechanism (should one be required).
Help finding goniometers for sat tag recovery at sea
8 June 2023 7:47pm
17 June 2023 6:42am
If you can find a radio amateur club in your area, they could be a good resource. They have a competitive event called fox hunting, which involves locating a hidden transmitter.
Anyway, a directional antenna for 401MHz can be made easily and cheaply but you have to know what you're doing. The cheapest (USD20?) radio receiver is an SDR dongle for your laptop or Android phone, but again you have to know what you're doing.
Using this setup would be like tracking a VHF animal tag, you swing the antenna around until you get the strongest signal and go that way. It would not be like using the Argos CLS, you don't get a GPS location of the tag, and it doesn't identify any tags it picks up.
30 June 2023 1:56pm
1/ A goniometer is a type of receiver which can measure an angle and then tell you where your signal is coming from in a specific frequency band. It is much more complicated to develop which explain price.
2/ With a basic receiver using a YAGI antenna, you will have to get the signal location by turning around. If the receiver is not enough sensitive and if the antenna is a bad quality, you won't get signal at all. You can lose lots of time.
3/ With a basic receiver using an omni-directional antenna, you will get the signal but you won't know where the signal is coming from. Same as before, if the receiver is not enough sensitive and if the antenna is a bad quality, you won't get signal at all. Depend what you are looking for.
I hope this will help you to better understand differences between these tech.
If you need more informations, you can contact me directly by mail at [email protected]
21 September 2023 6:16pm
The CLS Goniometer is an excellent tool for the job - I believe it is also available to rent (at least it used to).
If you want to go the low-budget route I would consider building a cross antenna with 4 yagi's, connect these to some kind of 4-channel receiver, and use the relative differences in intensity between the orthogonal directions to estimate the angle of arrival. You would need a way to simultaneously change the Rx gain on the four channels. Remember the transmission rate much lower than a typical VHF transmitter so it will take a while to find a tag this way. Using a single yagi would be basically impossible unless the sea is a mirror and the tag not moving in the waves.
Reviewing Now: Animal Telemetry Postdoctoral Fellowship
24 August 2023 11:09pm
Mobile App. Developer / Gibbon Research
24 August 2023 9:59am
MoveApps: A Digital Home for Tracking Data Analysis
17 August 2023 7:47pm
RFID Smart traps
23 April 2021 9:10am
7 June 2022 12:47pm
Hi Caitlin,
you might also look at this RFID logger sold by Labmaker:
Greetings from Austria,
Robin
6 January 2023 8:56pm
11 August 2023 12:50pm
Hi Caitlin
I'd recommend https://naturecounters.com/ who from past experience will work with you to come up with a good trap design. Their approach is to use an IR to detect when an animal starts to pass through the detector, which then triggers the RFID coil to be powered up. The huge advantage of this method is the battery power required is then very low, and the data can be stored into an SD card, all in one cheap, self-contained unit.
Roy
Conservation Technology Specialist
11 August 2023 1:21am
SensorDrop
11 August 2023 12:18am
Firetail 11 - GPS and sensor analysis
18 July 2023 5:04pm
11 August 2023 12:15am
Hi Tobias!
This sounds great and I am looking forward to trying it out after returning from field work!
Very cool with the Vectronic Activity data! I am looking forward to check How we can use that!
Cheers,
Lars
Firetail 11 released - for GPS and sensor analysis
10 August 2023 7:02pm
I wrote a short article on new features in Firetail 11. The most recent version (11.0.3) features some great performance improvements and also fully enables the new reporting module.
see also: https://wildlabs.net/discussion/firetail-11-gps-and-sensor-analysis
#Tech4Wildlife Photo Challenge: Judges' Panel Honorees
4 August 2023 10:00am
#Tech4Wildlife Photo Challenge: Community Choice Honorees
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Workshop on the use of information and communications technology for conservation in Central Asia
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ICARUS flies faster, further
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Postdoc for electrical engineering at NASA
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12 July 2023 9:30am
Pangolin Tagging Challenges
11 January 2017 11:22pm
21 April 2023 2:04pm
Hi - Operation Pangolin is exploring conservation technologies for Pangolins, here's a link to the project: Operation Pangolin launches to save world's most trafficked wild mammal | WILDLABS
Let's keep in touch!
3 July 2023 9:24am
Hi,
Icoteq are launching a new range of small tags that would be ideal for pangolin tracking!
Called TagRanger, the technology incorporates a LoRaWAN based tag with built in sensors and GPS. It also features a ranging solution giving you your distance to the tag when within range <150m - ideal for finding something which is well hidden as you can navigate your way to the tag until it's within touching distance!
The user carries a small handheld 'Finder' device that acts as a LoRaWAN gateway paired to a mobile phone for live mapping (on and offline maps) and ranging functions.
Size is limited by your preferred battery size, but could be as small as 32mm x 38mm x15mm with a 400mAh battery.
Production units available beginning of September, happy to do demos and trials with prototypes now!
Please feel free to contact me for more information.
5 July 2023 1:53am
Hi!
We have been working with Save Vietnam's Wildlife to track Pangolins for a couple of years now. You can read our Case Study here:
We also documented the project and spoke with Save Vietnam's Executive Director about the challenges of tracking Pangolins - here is the video:
They used the Telenax pangolin tags (15g) during our project which worked great with our drone-based telemetry system and were able to receive signals from a long distance. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions, we are always happy to discuss tracking projects!
Osa Conservation: A Multi-Tech Toolbox of Solutions
22 June 2023 10:42am
The Wildlife Society Conference
19 June 2023 5:59am
Sustained Effort: Out with the New, In with the Old
14 June 2023 10:00am
movedesign: a tool to evaluate sampling design in biologging
12 June 2023 11:25pm
This paper discusses movedesign, a new R app intended to evaluate the effectiveness of sampling design in animal movement research projects. This tool could be incredibly helpful for biologging community members looking to increase the effectiveness of their projects by better understanding the best duration and intervals for data collection.
7 September 2023 10:57am
Interesting. interesting. I'm probably jumping the gun here but I'm curious - are you getting any trends on types of biologgers or specific manufacturers people are talking about? Or is everyone using different tags/manufacturers?