Design of Deployment Strategies to Monitor the Movement of Animals with Passive Electronic Devices.

Laila D Kazimierski,Víctor M Eguíluz,Jorge P Rodríguez

doi:10.3390/s21020326

Abstract

Current animal monitoring systems have improved our knowledge of quantitative animal ecology. There are many electronic tracking technologies such as VHF/UHF telemetry, light-level geolocation, ARGOS satellite telemetry and GPS tracking. To reach the desired level of information retrieval requires the planning of adequate equipment effort and coverage, which depends on the properties of the system. We propose an equipment arrangement model consisting of a given number of receiver stations in a two-dimensional space in which the animals move according to a central place movement model. The objective is to characterize how the transmission of tracking data depends on the movement of the animals and the design of the equipment deployment: quantity and location of the receiver stations and their associated reception radius. We also implement the model using real trajectories of southern elephant seals and Australian sea lions publicly available online and tracked during the years 2010–2012. We characterize the data transmission based on different equipment configurations and we obtained analogous results to the theoretical model.

Highlights

The development of sensors for monitoring animals revolutionized the way of studying their behavior
We divided this section into three parts, first characterizing the result of the simulations regarding how the transfer function changes depending on the model parameters, characterizing the elapsed time between transmission events and, considering the case of having mobile receiver stations
Characterization of the Transfer Function Considering the movement of animals according to Equation (1), we compute the average number of transmitted packages per unit time per animal T as a function of the number of receiver stations arranged randomly in space for different values of a (Figure 2, left)

Summary

Introduction

The development of sensors for monitoring animals revolutionized the way of studying their behavior. Among the most used electronic tracking methods are VHF/UHF telemetry, ARGOS satellite telemetry and GPS tracking [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9], which allow us to obtain the location tracking of the animals. In addition to the position, we can measure environmental variables such as temperature or depth which can affect their movement. By combining location tracking with data acquired from inertial sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes, it is possible to identify when and where specific behaviors occur (feeding or escaping, among others). The transmitted information measured by the sensors placed on the animals is captured by receivers or is stored in memory for later transmission or downloaded once the equipment is recovered [10]

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Conclusion