At Ceres Tag, it is important that we are sustainable and have little to no impact on the environment. 

• The battery life of the tag is 10 years and is recharged via solar panels. One battery for the life of the tag.
  • No off-animal re-charging required
  • No additional batteries 
• The only commercial, direct to satellite, animal monitoring ear tag 
  • No onsite infrastructure to set up or take down
  • No towers or other infrastructure such as receiving stations, radios or large power systems required
• Biosecurity and pandemic safe. 
  • Ceres Tag staff do not need to visit sites where the tags will be applied
• Our packaging is recyclable. 
• Our e-commerce platform,  allows for direct purchase from cerestag.com.  
  • Which means, direct to manufacture order with little or no paperwork for ordering.  

By Ceres Tag designing the systems and tags in this manner, It will also allow for your carbon footprint to be minimal on the ground once you apply the tags. You can be anywhere in the world and view animals, without being in the same location

Most of what I have done has been in a couple areas: 

* Sensor re-use and repair, to the extent possible. This is an area where, especially with acoustic sensors, replaceable microphones have been a godsend that have really enabled us to extend the lifespan of older units

* Rechargeable batteries for some deployments. These don't travel well and don't have quite the life of alkalines, but for our sensors that are easily serviced (local to us) we use rechargeables to minimize waste. This was originally a long-term cost-cutting measure but has also let us minimize e-waste as a convenient side effect.

More generally, in my thinking about climate, it's worth it to emphasize that the carbon budget isn't zero, it's just finite. There are carbon-intensive activities that are sometimes worth it, it's mostly a question of how do we evaluate that. In the case of conservation tech work, if we can use our knowledge and skills to, for example, minimize bird or bat take from renewable energy in ways that improve generation uptime or reduce community backlash, that can more than offset (in conceptual, if not concrete terms--I haven't done the math on this yet) a few higher-emissions research or conservation activities. Of course, we should work to minimize our impact however we can, but our sector is such a very small portion of the global economy and so our contribution to the broader decarbonization push is likely a better use of our collective time and resources.

I'm using sensors from Inkbird. Various types available, including cable probes. Powered by AAA rechargeables. 

Hi Becky,

Have you considered the Kestrel Drop D2? They're significantly cheaper at $99, but not rechargeable. They take button batteries, but these last a long time with standard settings. They connect to an app on a phone, but can store large amounts of data before needing to be synced. The one thing to be aware of is that you should make some kind of rain cover to hang them from, because the humidity sensor is exposed, so if it gets wet, it will just show 100%... 

Cheers,

Nick