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Biologging / Feed

Real-time tracking of animal movements is enabling more effective and efficient wildlife monitoring for management, security, and research. As devices get smaller and prices drop, the possibilities for using biologging on a larger scale have grown, and so have the possibilities for increasing customisation to meet specific research needs. Likewise, real-time tracking of illegal wildlife trade, timber, and fish products as they move from source to consumer can shed light on trafficking routes and actors, as well as support enforcement, making tracking gear a powerful tool beyond the field.

discussion

Passionate engineer offering funding and tech solutions pro-bono.

Krasi

23 January 2024 12:06pm

My name is Krasi Georgiev and I run an initiative focused on providing funding and tech solutions for stories with a real-world impact. The main reason is that I am passionate...

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Danilo

26 January 2024 3:18pm

Hi Krasi! Greetings from Brazil!



That's a cool journey you've started! Congratulations. And I felt like theSearchLife resonates with the work I'm involved round here. In a nutshell, I live at the heart of the largest remaining of Atlantic forest in the planet - one of the most biodiverse biomes that exist. The subregion where I live is named after and bathed by the "Rio Sagrado" (Sacred River), a magnificent water body with a very rich cultural significance to the region (it has served as a safe zone for fleeing slaves). Well, the river and the entire bioregion is currently under the threat of a truly devastating railroad project which, to say the least is planned to cut through over 100 water springs! 



In face of that the local community (myself included) has been mobilizing to raise awareness of the issue and hopefully stop this madness (fueled by strong international forces). One of the ways we've been fighting this is through the seeking of the recognition of the sacred river as an entity of legal rights, who can manifest itself in court, against such threats. And to illustrate what this would look like, I've been developing this AI (LLM) powered avatar for the river, which could maybe serve as its human-relatable voice. An existing prototype of such avatar is available here. It has been fine-tuned with over 20 scientific papers on the Sacred River watershed.



And right now myself and other are mobilizing to manifest the conditions/resources to develop a next version of the avatar, which would include remote sensing capacities so the avatar is directly connected to the river and can possibly write full scientific reports on its physical properties (i.e. water quality) and the surrounding biodiversity. In fact, myself and 3 other members of the WildLabs community have just applied to the WildLabs Grant program in order to accomplish that. Hopefully the results are positive.



Finally, it's worth mentioning that our mobilization around providing an expression medium for the river has been multimodal, including the creation of a shortfilm based on theatrical mobilizations we did during a fest dedicated to the river and its surrounding more-than-human communities. You can check that out here:



 

https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/850179762



 

Let's chat if any of that catches your interest!

Cheers!

Krasi

2 February 2024 1:22pm

Hi Danilo. you seem very passionate about this initiative which is a good start.
It is an interesting coincidence that I am starting another project for the coral reefs in the Philipines which also requires water analytics so I can probably work on both projects at the same time.

Let's that have a call and discuss, will send you a pm with my contact details

There is a tech glitch and I don't get email notifications from here.

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discussion

Questions regarding the use of solar panels to extend battery life of GPS collars

Travis Bayer

6 January 2024 8:44pm

Hey!If anyone here has had any experience using solar panels to extend the battery life of their tracking collars, I would love to hear from you! How effective was the...

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Travis Bayer

28 January 2024 10:27pm

Lars,

As always, your insights are great! The GPS Plus X battery life calculator is great! I've downloaded it and have been toying around with it, very convenient when thinking about sampling schedules. Curious as to why more tech developers don't incorporate something similar into their own programming/analysis software. Very useful.

I've got a few meetings set up with a couple different tech developers, but may reach to Vectronic here. At first glance, their collars seem great! I appreciate the recommendations.

 

I must admit, I am not well versed in Python, but I am looking into something that wold be the R equivalent. If I don't have much luck, I may try and take a look at how that package was made in Python and attempt to recreate it in R.

 

You're the best Lars! Thanks!

 

Cheers,

Travis

Travis Bayer

28 January 2024 10:42pm

Hi Bill,

I don't believe I will need them to be extremely accurate, but will need a good degree of accuracy for some behavioral classification and habitat use analyses. In regards to the solar, tracking the solar cycle is a great suggestion. I have also considered having some thresholds programmed in the accelerometer to power off both sensors during periods of sleep/rest in order to conserve battery life. I did this same thing in my last study for the GPS only, so there wouldn't be instances where the trackers continued to try and unsuccessfully acquire GPS fixes while the bats where inside their caves resting. After the bat's surge axis dropped into the -1 and there was 10 unsuccessful GPS fix attempts in a row, the GPS powered down.

 

Thanks for the suggestions and insights Bill!

 

Best,

Travis

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discussion

Cat Island, Bahamas biologger recovery

Alasdair Davies

7 December 2023 9:57pm

Hi everyone,A random request to see if any WILDLAB members may live in, or near the Bahamas on the off chance that you could help to recover one of our plastic...

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Thomas Gray

12 January 2024 4:07pm

Were you guys able to recover the tag? @Alasdair 

Herdhanu Jayanto

17 January 2024 6:05pm

Hi Alasdair,

I am also curious with the result, were you able to recover the tag? Also is there any that ended up in Indonesia sea? We would love to help the recovery if any.

Cheers,

Dhanu

Alasdair Davies

23 January 2024 2:37pm

Hi @ThomasGray_Argos, @YvanSG  and @hjayanto,

Thank you all for getting in touch. Luckily the Cat Island Institute via YME Bahamas got in touch and prepared an expedition to recover it. They couldn't access the beach during the first attempt, but a second attempt is planned. I'll hopefully be able to recover it shortly. 

Thanks again,

Alasdair

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discussion

Open-source kinetic energy harvesting collar - Kinefox

Thomas Gray

1 November 2023 5:31pm

Hello everyone,I ran across an article today (at the bottom) that talks about an open-source, kinetic energy harvesting collar ("Kinefox"). It sounds pretty neat...anyways,...

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Herdhanu Jayanto

17 January 2024 7:45pm

This is super cool! 

I was wondering if the development will further touch marine or aquatic animals, make it like water wheel (even might give burden to aerodynamic). Thank you for sharing!

Best,

Dhanu

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discussion

How to build my VHF tags from the scratch?

Simon Ripperger

9 January 2019 10:04am

Hi all, I was wondering if anybody has experience in building VHF-tags from the scratch. I couldn't find useful instructions online, so maybe anybody wants to share own...

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discussion

What is your favorite package or software for visualizing animal tracking data?

Lacey Hughey

12 September 2023 6:52pm

Hi all,I manage a large research collaborative focused on conservation applications of animal tracking data (Smithsonian's Movement of Life Initiative).  I'm interested in...

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discussion

Seeking Host Organisations for Travel Scholarship Application

Eva Neill

19 December 2023 12:54am

Hi all,I'm Eva, a final year undergraduate studying Joint Honours Biology and Geography at the University of St Andrews.  I've recently joined the WildLabs community in...

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Herdhanu Jayanto

20 December 2023 3:07am

Hi Eva, 

Me and my colleagues run a small NGO based on Yogyakarta in Indonesia, although our projects are spread around the country. One of our active project is working with the movement ecology of Sunda gharials in Berbak-Sembilang National Park. One of the other is for Malayan Giant Turtle conservation using one-plan approach, which we are planning to start in situ phase. We can't give you promise about anything, but are able to be the host organization and would love to talk the opportunity!

Cheers,

Dhanu

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discussion

Which market-available microphones, accelerometers and GIS sensors for dogs / pets ?

Luigi

7 September 2023 3:21pm

I have conducted an MSc thesis in data-science applied on bioacoustics data, and wish to carry on some experiments on my own now, using domestic environment as a lab.I am looking...

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Luigi

6 December 2023 2:03pm

good to know that GPS coordinates can be used to sync the time. 
Does GPS resolution allow to a desired time resolution (e.g. seconds) ? Does choice of time resolution significantly depends on the physiology of the animal (e.g. time of re-action to stimuli, hence less than a second) or for most animal communication and animal behaviour is it enough above a second? 
 

Paul Bunker

17 December 2023 3:02pm

I am not an acoustics person but train and deploy canines in the field. Are you looking for something that records  sniff rate and patterns?  For GPS I just use a Garmin collar system Altha 100. There is a Conservation Canine group that might be worth asking your question in. 

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discussion

Data Viz Inspo December 20th

Lars Holst Hansen

12 December 2023 12:03pm

I feel that stuff sometimes gets overlooked in the other channels than Discussions.Maybe it is only me! ...In any case, this online event looks super insteresting: (and my...

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article

How to Choose a Biologger - Collaring Koalas with Matthew Stanton

Holly Cormack

7 December 2023 12:00pm

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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Lars Holst Hansen

12 December 2023 5:22pm

Very cool feature! I wonder if you had any issues with clock drift and offset on the various loggers, @M_Stanton. I am struggling a bit at the moment with soome audiologger in...
Matthew Stanton

13 December 2023 10:06pm

Hi Lars,Yes, the audio devices had a number of issues when it came to time recording.The clock on these devices was set via the microSD card. You would program the card with a...
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discussion

Query regarding Biologgers for Freshwater crabs

Abinesh A

16 November 2023 4:45am

I'm new to WildLabs, I guess I'm writing in a relevant area to get addressed with my query. I'm doing my doctoral research at Bharathiar University currently. I am planning to do...

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Rob Appleby

18 November 2023 10:37pm

My pleasure @Abinesh and if you have any more questions etc., don't hesitate to ask. This is a great community with plenty of smart cookies that can help and also me if I am able!

All the best for your research. 

Rob

Thomas Gray

1 December 2023 8:54pm

Star-Oddi in Iceland comes to mind, but I'm not 100% sure. 

Abinesh A

3 December 2023 2:43am

Thank you Thomas, you are absolutely right but when I Mailed them, I didn't get a response about the price , shipment and so on! Thus I arrived to find some loggers in India itself 

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discussion

Alternative trackers for study of grey parrots movement patterns

Ninying Benedicta

3 November 2023 7:31pm

Hi everyone, i pray this message reaches you well. Please I am looking for alternative ideas as to which other tracker to use on the African grey parrots to track their movement...

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Kyler Abernathy

1 December 2023 8:10pm

Hi Ninying,

One benefit of the Pinpoint tags is that they are user-rechargeable, something pretty much unheard of for satellite tags for decades!  If you can recover the tags, you might be able to achieve a larger samples size with fewer tags (less $$) by redeploying the recovered tags - without the costs of having the manufacturer refurbish them.

cheers,

Kyler

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discussion

Automatic and open-source radio-tracking

Jennifer Lisa Insupp

15 November 2023 10:03am

Hi all, hope you're doing well! I have a question regarding this article, attached above: Do you know anything about that or do you have informations if this was implented...

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Sarah Radford

23 November 2023 4:58pm

Hi @tutgut5 @Rob_Appleby  



their system has been used in a research project at the University of Marburg (LOEWE-Schwerpunkt  Natur 4.0), its also been used in combination with Infra-red videos of bat movements (BatRack). We cooperated with them in 2021 for a small telemetry study, it worked well for us, here is their homepage 

https://trackit.systems/team/

(although I'm not sure how up to date it is), if you have questions and would like some more info about their system there is an email address to contact them at. 







All the best,

Sarah

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event

Animove 2024

Adrien Pajot

17 November 2023 10:47am

Join the summer programme from 17 June until 28 June 2024 with leading researchers to expand your knowledge and to take the opportunity to form networks and friendships with academics and students from around the world.

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discussion

TWS2023 - get in touch

Tobias Petri

5 November 2023 8:13pm

Hi, I'll stick around at the TWS2023 Louisville with our friends from e-obs to do some live Firetail demos and discuss your ideas and requirements. Would be great to get in...

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Tobias Petri

5 November 2023 9:04pm

I'm registered with the TWS2023 app, so feel free to nudge me there as well

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