Animal movement technologies have already significantly 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. Continuing advances in the development of technologies for collecting and transmitting bio-logging data, combined with the increased availability of high-resolution environmental data and analytical developments in movement modelling, are opening doors to novel applications. However, there are still major gaps in the space, including mobilizing movement data to translate data from tracking devices into insights for application in policy and practice. This group is a place for the animal movement community to connect and discuss our efforts to advance the field.
Resources for beginners
Learn about WILDLABS Animal Movement research projects
- MoveBON Initiative Announcement
- MoveBON Follow-Up Discussion
- Virtual Meetup Season 4: Tracking Progress (A WILDLABS research project on movement ecology)
Group curators
- @TaliaSpeaker
- | She/her
WILDLABS & World Wide Fund for Nature/ World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
I'm the Executive Manager of WILDLABS at WWF



- 23 Resources
- 64 Discussions
- 31 Groups
- @lhughey
- | she/her
Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute
I am an ecologist and program manager with experience leading collaborative research projects in international settings. I specialize in the application of animal tracking data to conserve migratory species on a changing planet.



- 6 Resources
- 10 Discussions
- 3 Groups
No showcases have been added to this group yet.
Interested in bioacoustics
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 14 Groups
Postdoc working on movement ecology
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 1 Groups
- 0 Resources
- 6 Discussions
- 4 Groups
A Wildlife Biologist interested in Environment Assessment and Restoration, In-situ and Ex-situ strategies, Technologies used in Conservation and Illegal Wildlife Trade.


- 0 Resources
- 16 Discussions
- 15 Groups
- @WyattB
- | He / him / his
Data science and ML specialist
- 0 Resources
- 2 Discussions
- 7 Groups
- @NevilleCLS
- | He/Him
CLS (Collecte Localisation Satellites)

- 0 Resources
- 1 Discussions
- 14 Groups
- @kenadyWilson
- | she/her
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 8 Groups
I am a biology undergraduate student who is interested in the field of wildlife conservation and has skills in field observation and identification
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 12 Groups
- @marinejoly
- | she / her
Associate Professor in Cognitive Ethology (University of Portsmouth, UK), I am interested in primate behaviour and cognition. I am seeking new avenues to investigate animal cognition and address conservation issues.
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 5 Groups
- @CatherineJardine
- | She/Her
Birds Canada Data Science and Technology Team. Primarily working on Motus and NatureCounts.

- 0 Resources
- 4 Discussions
- 6 Groups
- 0 Resources
- 5 Discussions
- 8 Groups
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 4 Groups
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...
4 March 2020
The Esri Conservation Program is now accepting applications for grant assistance to access its ArcGIS Solutions for Protected Area Management Application. This system provides access to a suite of both mobile and web...
4 March 2020
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...
3 March 2020
In a first, UMass Amherst, Cornell use AI to mine big migration data on massive scale
9 October 2019
Ol Pejeta Conservancy partners with conservation and technology organisations to kick-start a research and innovation centre for wildlife conservation
31 May 2019
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...
3 May 2019
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...
12 March 2019
Happy World Wildlife Day! To celebrate, this week we've asked our community to share photos showing how they are using tech in the field or the lab, using the #Tech4Wildlife hashtag.
3 March 2019
Launched at the recent The Things conference, OpenCollar is a conservation collaboration to design, support and deploy open-source tracking collar hardware and software for environmental and wildlife monitoring projects...
6 February 2019
Despite great advances in radio-telemetry technology, tracking small animals still presents challenges due to the weight of tracking equipment. In this article originally published on Mongabay, author Jason Gregg covers...
31 October 2018
NASA and The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) have launched the Next Generation Animal Tracking Ideation Challenge, seeking your ideas for how to use emerging SmallSat/CubeSat technology along with other Space,...
14 September 2018
Article
This past week was an exciting milestone for animal tracking, with the ICARUS (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space) Initiative's antenna successfully installed on the International Space Station. ...
24 August 2018
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100 Products
Recently updated products
Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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Hi @ONCA ,Good to know you are looking into this. I have checked our email, but can not find any request for information or contact. Please reach out to me personally at tim@... |
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Animal Movement | 9 months ago | |
Hello everyone! For anyone interested in building an antenna for animal tracking, I recently created a lightweight, weather-resistant Yagi... |
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Animal Movement | 9 months 2 weeks ago | |
No problem at all Yu (@JY) and good luck with your studies! Happy to discuss this and any other ideas any time.All the best,Rob |
+10
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Sensors, Animal Movement, Connectivity, Drones, Open Source Solutions, Emerging Tech | 9 months 2 weeks ago | |
Thanks, we know they are breeding these animals here, I asked, since it's seems to be an expensive hobby, we need to allocate more funding for rural women in entrepreneurship and... |
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Acoustics, Animal Movement, Citizen Science, Human-Wildlife Coexistence, Protected Area Management Tools, Wildlife Crime | 10 months ago | |
Hi Maggie,Welcome to the base of Mt. Everest. I am in this group because I have been working and developing software to document 3D points and capture audio -- not for... |
+3
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Animal Movement | 11 months 1 week ago | |
Hi Jesse, how are you? tricky request, batteries at very low temperatures will consume a lot fasterhow big do you need it? a liitle help solution is to make a temperature... |
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Animal Movement | 11 months 1 week ago | |
However, I think it's important to reflect further to determine exactly what needs to be done. |
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Climate Change, AI for Conservation, Animal Movement, Citizen Science | 1 year ago | |
interesting!!! |
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AI for Conservation, Animal Movement, Data management and processing tools | 1 year ago | |
so great!!! |
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Software Development, AI for Conservation, Animal Movement | 1 year ago | |
@cmwainaina please take a look |
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Animal Movement, AI for Conservation, Camera Traps, Connectivity, Data management and processing tools, East Africa Community, Emerging Tech, Ethics of Conservation Tech, Human-Wildlife Coexistence, Marine Conservation, Protected Area Management Tools, Geospatial, Sensors, Software Development | 1 year ago | |
Hi Emily,RFID tags and an array of readers is certainly possible. We developed a system for tracking translocated species using long range radio (LoRa) and internet of things (IoT... |
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Animal Movement | 1 year 1 month ago | |
Glad to announce that a new tutorial is available on Firetail: |
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AI for Conservation, Animal Movement | 1 year 1 month ago |
Elephant Collar
11 June 2022 3:53pm
25 June 2022 3:26pm
its nylon rubber material
WILDLABS Virtual Meetup: Future Questions & Tools in Movement Ecology (Recording)
22 June 2022 10:24pm
On the lookout for CAD/Microcontroller work!
17 June 2022 5:04pm
Virtual Meetup Discussion: Future Questions & Tools in Movement Ecology
7 June 2022 9:38pm
11 June 2022 4:42pm
We've actually been looking into NFC to automatically provision field devices to set/read/store metadata. We're staring down the barrel of a large deployment and metadata is one of the issues that we think really needs automation. We're thinking of having a dedicated device to write and read the tags that would go on the devices as stickers and automagically sync the metadata with the database. An added bonus would be that most recently modern phones support NFC protocols like NTAG or MiFare Classic. That would mean that they could also be both read and written with the GPS coordinates, timestamp, etc as they're deployed in the field. It's still under discussion with the many other things that need to be implemented, though. I do think it's interesting that what we're seeing in a lot of conservation technology applications is not just a need for new technology but also the less exciting but more practical need for things that improve productivity like automating metadata management.
12 June 2022 1:08am
Using NFC makes a lot of sense too. I'm just on an older lower-end device that doesn't support it, which is why it didn't pop immediately to mind. Would be interesting to see what the adoption rate for NFC-capable phones is across countries though I'd imagine some phone manufacturer or something already has that data.
12 June 2022 2:29am
A bit opposite of what you're looking for but according to this, the share of non-NFC enabled phones was 10% in 2020. They don't state their source unless you pay, but I suspect that's in terms of total phone models, not total phones in use. So it's highly likely that phones with no NFC in use is much higher than that.

Ocean Tracking Network - Telemetry Data Study Hall
8 June 2022 6:48pm
Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Ungulate Ecology Lab
8 June 2022 1:32pm
Heart rate detected with accelerometers
1 June 2022 11:41pm
2 June 2022 8:08am
Hi Max,
Well firstly, welcome! This is a great intro - I'm looking forward to having a poke around these links and reading more about your work. Sounds like you might well be interested in the topic of our meetup next week - we'll be talking about the future of biologging and biologging, the emerging tech and questions we should be paying attention to. I can't remember if I've seen your name pop up in our last few events, but hopefully will see you there! More below if you're interested!
Steph
WILDLABS Virtual Meetup: Data Sharing and Archiving in Movement Ecology (Recording)
31 May 2022 11:03pm
Argos satellite tag open-source grant
14 August 2020 5:43pm
26 August 2020 4:07pm
The official announcement went out yesterday - https://mailchi.mp/1e130f609ed2/august2020?e=[UNIQID]
31 May 2022 3:56pm
We are still running this grant program albeit with subtle changes to improve the hardware/service agreement (in your favor).
If you want to build your own tag, have a passion for open-source, and at minimum have a North American ship-to address, reach out.
New paper: A practical approach with drones, smartphones, and tracking tags for potential real-time animal tracking
29 May 2022 1:15pm
WILDLABS Virtual Meetup: Future Questions & Tools in Movement Ecology
24 May 2022 10:10pm
WILDLABS Virtual Meetup: Data Analysis in Movement Ecology (Recording)
12 May 2022 10:03pm
WILDLABS Virtual Meetup: Data Sharing & Archiving in Movement Ecology
10 May 2022 11:26pm
WILDLABS Virtual Meetup: Data Collection in Movement Ecology (recording)
9 May 2022 3:51pm
WILDLABS Virtual Meetups Season Four: Tracking Progress
29 April 2022 9:57am
WILDLABS Virtual Meetup: Data Analysis in Movement Ecology

26 April 2022 12:00am
Firetail - visualization of tracks and sensor data
9 April 2022 5:12pm
12 April 2022 9:17am
Hello!
Yes, Firetail is primarilly meant for visualisation of tracking and sensor data (from accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers etc).
A good place to get an introduction to the possibilities is the company's youtube page:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-3sXPVomr4mafv16SAOpiA/videos
Best regards,
Lars
22 April 2022 7:21am
Hi Lars,
thanks a lot for the recommendation and this great use case!
Our team at Firetail is very enthusiastic about pushing the boundaries for the visualization and annotation of large datasets and it is great to see our work towards a Vectronic acceleration workflow was successul.
If there are researchers on wildlabs that are interested in the process, we should compile a short step-by-step tutorial. This would help to get started with Vectronic acc visuals/annotation.
In general: Firetail is not limited to specific tags vendors. We aim to support a complete set of GPS/Acceleration/Sensor data... if you experience problems with your data sets, don't hesitate to contact us!
Tobias
22 April 2022 7:47am
Hi Truphena,
Firetail is designed with animal telemetry in mind. But, you could import any kind of data that features latitute, longitude and some kind of ID (plus whatever sensors you have) like ship vessels, air traffic and so on. It is mostly a matter of getting the formats straight, but our support can help you with that.
Some adaptions may be required, but Firetail has grown with the community use cases from day one, we do not intend to change this any time soon.
What kind of data are you working on?
A good place to start may be the manual or, as Lars mentionend, our video tutorials (I linked the beginner's tutorial). You can also contact our support for specific questions.
Tobias
WILDLABS Virtual Meetup: Data Collection in Movement Ecology

19 April 2022 12:00am
News: The Latest in Conservation Tech
10 March 2022 12:00am
Opportunities: PhD Graduate Assistantship
8 March 2022 12:00am
Dog GPS Loggers
21 December 2021 8:06pm
19 February 2022 11:20pm
@alsnothome the SnapperGPS looks sooooooo SWEET!. I am super-duper keen to try it out!
20 February 2022 6:59am
20 February 2022 10:50am
I'm co-developing SnapperGPS as part of my PhD. We're currently working on getting a release on GroupGets. Everything is moving a little slowly because of the chip shortage, though.
Happy to hear there's interest!
Paper suggestions for learning movement tracking technology development
9 February 2022 7:16pm
Tech Tutors: How do I get started with OpenCollar Edge Trackers?
3 November 2021 11:35am
Technical Difficulties: The Death of Giants
3 November 2021 12:00am
Opportunity: PhD or Postdoctoral Research Fellowships - Chinstrap penguin biologging
1 November 2021 12:00am
Technical Difficulties: Can You Hear Me Now?
19 October 2021 12:00am
The need for speed in Sea Turtle Telemetry
15 October 2021 12:00am
Technical Difficulties: A Deployment Checklist
13 October 2021 12:00am
Technical Difficulties: Tracking Thunderbird
8 October 2021 12:00am
Call for Papers: Special Issue on Computer Vision Approach for Animal Tracking and Modeling
20 September 2021 12:00am
16 June 2022 11:33pm
Great work @kangs and Technology For Wildlife Africa! Can I ask, what's the collar material made out of?
Cheers,
Rob