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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.

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Get To Know FIT

WILDLABS Team

6 May 2020 12:00am

We're excited to welcome the WildTrack FIT group to our community! Today, we'd like to introduce you to the Footprint Identification Technique (FIT) and share how you can incorporate this tracking method into your field...

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article

Era of the Condor: A Species' Future in Recovery

Ellie Warren

5 May 2020 12:00am

In this three-part WILDLABS feature article, we'll take a look at the various technologies used to fight the greatest threat to endangered condors, explore the innovations that may change the way we study and understand...

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Talking Tracking with Xerius

Ellie Warren

23 April 2020 12:00am

How does tracking technology meet the many challenges specific to monitoring birds within their home ranges and over long distances during migration? WILDLABS community member Virginie Perilhon from Xerius Tracking...

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article

WILDLABS Tech Hub: WWF PandaSat

WILDLABS Team

13 April 2020 12:00am

At the 2018 London Illegal Wildlife Trade Conference, we announced the WILDLABS Tech Hub, an accelerator programme created to support the development and scaling of groundbreaking technological solutions addressing the ...

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event

Online Workshop: Conservation Technology

Hack the Poacher

23 March 2020 12:00am

On Friday, March 27th, meet the Hack the Poacher team in this free online webinar to discuss the latest innovations in conservation technology. This interactive event offers the opportunity to make connections in the...

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article

Enter the Zooniverse: Try Citizen Science for Yourself!

Ellie Warren

18 March 2020 12:00am

Trapped inside during the COVID-19 quarantine and looking to engage with conservation science without leaving your desk? Citizen science projects like those on Zooniverse offer a great opportunity to impact scientific...

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discussion

OpenCollar Update 1

Laurens de Groot

6 March 2019 12:05pm

Time for a quick update as our team is working at full speed to have our first open source elephant tracker ready by the end of March.  As you might know,  we are...

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Rob Appleby

18 April 2019 3:51pm

Hi Jackson,

Attached a few images showing how we attach the koala drop-off to collar material. The first shows the bare nichrome-acrylic plate with the nylon line in-situ. There's also a picture of an actual koala drop-off with the line exiting the plate. Lastly, the triple overhand knots (repeated so the knots are doubled over and secure) tying the line through the collar material. Normally, we hide the nylon by splicing the collar material in half, tying the knots, and then gluing the collar material back together so no nylon is exposed. 

Does all that make sense? Any questions just let me know.

Cheers,

Rob

Rob Appleby

19 April 2019 7:55am

also, we noticed our BoM was missing from GitHub, so we've added it now: https://github.com/Wild-Spy/OpenDrop/blob/master/Documentation/OpenDrop_BOM.xls

Robin Poches

5 March 2020 4:44am

the drop off paper

https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/2041-210X.13231

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#Tech4Wildlife 2020 Photo Challenge In Review

WILDLABS Team

4 March 2020 12:00am

2020 marked our fifth year holding our annual #Tech4Wildlife Photo Challenge, and our community made it a milestone to remember. Conservationists took to Twitter last week to share their best high-tech snapshots from...

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funding

Call for Nominations: Tusk Conservation Awards

Tusk

3 March 2020 12:00am

The 2020 Tusk Awards are now accepting nominations of outstanding individuals who have made a significant impact on conservation in Africa. These nominations offer the rare and exciting opportunity to honor your peers...

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discussion

How to add a salt water switch

Ned Horning

28 February 2020 4:52pm

Hi – I’m working on developing a GPS / LoRa tracker for Diamondback Terrapins (DBT) with some colleagues. DBTs spend a lot of time in brackish water and we’...

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event

Hawai'i Conservation Conference

Hawaiʻi Conservation Alliance

28 February 2020 12:00am

The Hawai'i Conservation Conference is accepting abstracts in several categories, including emerging technological advances in the conservation field. This is an exciting opportunity to present your latest research to...

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event

Animove Summer School 2020

AniMove

13 February 2020 12:00am

Animal Movement Analysis summer school is offered as a two-week professional training course, that targets students, researchers and conservation practitioners that are interested to work or even have already collected...

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discussion

Curious about radio-tracking with drones?

Wildlife Drones

29 January 2020 3:44am

Hi Everyone, Laura from Wildlife Drones here. Thought I'd just hop on here to say hi! We're an Australian tech startup that aims to improve how animals are radio-...

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Harold Tay

12 February 2020 1:50pm

Hi,

Does your system work with normal VHF tags or do you make a custom tag for use in your system?

Does the drone have to be piloted manually in a particular path or pattern in order to acquire the tags?

Or can your receiver be placed on say a fixed-wing high speed drone programmed to fly a lawn mower pattern to cover the maximum amount of area?

I'm also curious how you are doing the direction finding, since there are no visible antennas, but I understand if you'd rather not talk about this (c:

Interesting work, thanks.

-harold

rcsmartin_tpg_com_au

12 February 2020 9:33pm

Thanks for asking Harold, 

We work with any off the shelf VHF tag, you can use tags already in the field or you can order tags from any of the manufactureres, just have to be VHF of in the case of satelite or GPS tags have a VHF componment.

The drone is piloted manually, you can see the tag locations on the base station in real time you can reposition the drone to avoid terrain challanges to get the best results.

We cover a lot of ground, I can do the math, flight patterns really come down to the application you are looking at animal being tracked ect, happy to discuss specifics further at you convenience.

We have videos of our work on out youtube channel 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCj1pcEJHkEPCy94AlT0U7HQ

The oringinal research papers are on researchgate     

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Debbie_Saunders

You can book a virtual demo with me, I'd love to hear about your work and ideas.  It would be great to give you a run through of the solution, flight patterns and user interface.

https://www.wildlifedrones.net/book-demo/

Robert

Wildlifedrones

[email protected]

+61 491 625 411

 

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discussion

Number of radio collared animals?

Peter Apps

9 December 2019 7:27pm

This is a slightly odd question; is there a sensible estimate (or intelligent informed guess) for the total number of animals carrying tracking devices (radio collars, GPS,...

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Alasdair Davies

4 January 2020 10:58pm

There are over 7000 tracked animals via Argos alone (monthly). More info here - http://www.argos-system.org/applications-argos/wildlife-monitoring/

 

Peter Apps

5 January 2020 10:49am

Thanks Alasdair

So there are low double figure thousands just with the various services of satellite collars. Then surely high tens of thousands, maybe low hundreds of thousands with terrestrial GPS and conventional VHF.

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discussion

Radio telemetry

HelenS

4 June 2019 4:39pm

Anyone on here have lots of experience with radio telemetry for tracking birds? Just wondering if there are any tips on how to reduce signal reception through the back of the...

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Stephanie O'Donnell

5 June 2019 11:33am

Hi Helen, 

Two suggestions coming through over twitter:

 

A good start is to reduce your reciever's gain as far as possible.
Hopefully you can snuff out the antenna's rear lobe that way. Headphones really help there too. https://t.co/9Eg4gpHVly

— Faunatech Austbat (@FtechAustbat) June 5, 2019

sometimes it helps to put your body behind the antenna at about waist height. Does that make sense?

— Rob Appleby (@wildspyrob) June 4, 2019

Steph

rcsmartin_tpg_com_au

18 December 2019 4:00am

Hi Helen, what tags are you using?  Position on the animal and what species?

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event

WILDLABS Virtual Meetup Recording: Drones

WILDLABS Team

9 November 2019 12:00am

The second event in Season Three of the WILDLABS Virtual Meetup Series is now available to watch, along with notes that highlight key takeaways from the talks and discussion. In the meetup, Craig Elder, Dr. Claire Burke...

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discussion

Studying pangolin ecology

Charles Emogor

16 April 2019 3:59pm

​ Hi All, I will be beginning a Ph.D. in the fall and will be studying pangolins in Nigeria to understand their ecology and population as well as the role Nigeria plays in...

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Charles Emogor

21 October 2019 3:26pm

Hi all, many thanks for the information.

Alasdair Davies

21 October 2019 11:42pm

Hi all,

Great to see this post continue to mature. Some good news for you all. Arribada has finished developing a lower cost open source Argos ARTIC R2 transmitter design with our development partners Icoteq for a National Geographic project. All thanks to @ThomasGray_Argos who originally gifted us 3 R2 development chips to work on an open reference design.

It's compatible with the Arribada Horizon GPS tracker, or cellular module if both are required in one device / unit. We'll look to integrate one of the LoRa radios from the Open Collar initiative too to create a comprehensive open solution that can be tweaked to form a viable pangolin tracker based on the attachment and epoxy designs above (thanks for the paper @Robin+Poches  , great research).

However, first up is Bangladesh for some open ocean plastics tracking.

More info here for now - https://www.icoteq.com/icoteqs-argos-satellite-transceiver-now-certified-by-cls/

Cheers,

Alasdair

Charles Emogor

22 October 2019 3:40pm

Fantastic news, Alasdair. Indeed timely. I was wondering what the finiancial impliation for one unit will be? A price range will suffice. Thanks.

C

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discussion

Wearable Tech Lions - Current Projects

Natalie Coles

17 October 2019 10:23am

Hi All, I am a Wildlife TV Producer and am currently looking at projects that include lions and wearable tech, whether this is for anti poaching projects, or monitoring population...

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Anthony Callaghan

18 October 2019 3:45am

Hi Natalie,

Interesting request. I may be able to help and am working in this area in Australia to track both native and introduced species. Would you please enlighten me with more specific objectives, location, duration and quantity.

Thanks.

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article

Technology for Wildlife and the Looming Spectre of E-Waste

Laure Joanny

3 May 2019 12:00am

In this blog, Laure Joanny adds her perspectives to an ongoing discussion that we've been seeing in the community about conservation tech and it's relationship to e-waste. How do we tackle the challenge of battery waste...

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discussion

9-axis sensors for tracking tiny animals

Jay Falk

14 April 2019 12:19am

Hi everyone! I study bird behavior and am interested in tracking technologies that could be miniature enough for hummingbirds. I know of radiotags that can be used, but very small...

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Jay Falk

14 April 2019 7:02pm

Thanks Harold for the clarification on the accuracy of the sensor! Sounds like this isn't where it needs to be for accurate location tracking.  I live just down the streen from Diginal Naturalism Labs, Andy is wonderful. Right now I have a network of 20 feeders all over our town which read implanted RFID's of visiting hummingbirds. Our thought was that maybe we could use a temporary glue to attach one of these to the back of a bird, and knowing the exact feeder location and time would allow us to calculate the amount of drift. If feeders were visited often the could be used as recallibration points to reset drift. 

Anyways, thank you again for the input. Even if the location tracking aspect doesn't work, tracking the levels of activity would be super interesting! I'll probably start with that :).

Alasdair Davies

14 April 2019 11:53pm

Hi jjinsing,

You could take the 9 axis LSM9DS1 sensor from the Horizon tag (open source) + firmware and build a  custom module. Your limitation will be the coin cell battery and switching to a smaller microcontroller to get the size and weight down. What's the weight of the hummingbirds? 11g odd?

There is a tarantular tracking project that requires a similar sized tag (bluetooth base stations to track), so if that gets built you could inherit that in the future. Htarold is correct in that actual location will need a local rfid / base station at the feeding station to know where they are and you'd be looking at behavioural and energetics logged to flash etc.

Cheers,

Alasdair

Harold Tay

15 April 2019 2:36am

Hi Jay, Alastair,

Small world!  You've got a great resource at your doorstep then (c:

Your idea of tracking the birds between known feeding locations is a good one, and it's made use of here.  But I don't know if the drift will cooperate over that long a period.  A colleague who looked into cheap accelerometers for navigation told me it doesn't work after 10 seconds or so.  But this was some years ago and things may have improved.  It might be possible to detect when a bird is stationary, to zero the device.  This is like when a fireman puts his foot down in the above case.

Thanks,

-harold

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Update on Arribada's Low Cost Open Source Sea Turtle Tag

Rachael Kemp

12 March 2019 12:00am

Current efforts to track endangered Green Sea Turtles rely on tags that cost upward of $2000 per unit. The Arribada Initiative and the Zoological Society of London have been developing a new open source solution for...

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discussion

The OpenCollar Initiative

Laurens de Groot

21 February 2019 12:57pm

We're incredibly excited to kickstart the OpenCollar initiative. If you haven't seen it yet, check out opencollar.io OpenCollar is a conservation collaboration...

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