Hi @ONCA 

LoRaWAN can be used very successfully in the applications you have mentioned!

Our TagRanger system is based around LoRaWAN and we've done a lot of range testing in various environments to assess performance.

LoRaWAN has various 'spreading factors' which govern not only potential range, but also how often you can transmit. The lowest (SF7) has the shortest range but you can transmit very often, while the highest (SF12) has the longest range but you are more limited in how often you can transmit. 

TagRanger can use a fixed LoRaWAN network installation, but we also have a 'Finder' device which acts as a LoRaWAN Gateway and attaches to your phone providing your own mobile LoRaWAN gateway you can pop up anywhere.  This gives great mobilty and we've also added special features such as remote Tag wake-up which you don't get with LoRaWAN networks.

We've tested range using a Finder communicating with our standard Tag which has an integrated antenna in a number of scenarios. We had robust communications at 21km with a line of sight connection at which point we ran out of space!  We could see from the LoRaWAN transmit/receive metrics that there was still plenty of headroom left to go even further, estimating >30km. As an aside, we've also had a turtle tracking version of our TagRanger Tag using an external wire antenna communicating at 48km.

We've also tested in a dense pine forest, in the rain (which makes things worse). We made sure the line of sight was through all the trees and could reliably connect over 1km away (before running out of room again) and this was approaching the limit.

Understanding that there are limits to LoRaWAN range, we also provide a 'Relay' capability with our TagRanger system. This allows you to effectively double the range between you and your Tag by putting the Finder on a drone, mast, balloon or strategic mountain top and hopping the connection from the Relay, to the Finder and on to the Tag.  

The biggest advantage of using the Relay though, is that you can look down through a canopy (or into a valley) and mitigate issues with signal propagation through a load of trees. 

Hope that helps for now, let me know if you would like any further information!

https://www.tagranger.com

Craig

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@smartparks.org

15km range with any terrestrial wireless connectivity in the forest is not realistic, this has nothing to do with LoRa/LoRaWAN specifics, but with radio in general. The signals will be absorbed by the vegetation. Therefore you need to looks at different strategies then tracking wildlife in the savanna or desert. Bear in mind that also the GNSS (GPS) signals coming from the satellites will have the same issue.

Possible strategies:

• Using Mesh/Relay networks in increase network density
• Using "contact tracing"
• Using LoRaWAN to satellite
• Using downloading of "logs" at fixed locations in the forest

Happy to discuss further.

Hi Maggie!

I have used Google Earth Pro for quick and dirty animation of movements of muskoxen.

I prepared .gpx file with the online and free service https://www.gpsvisualizer.com/

Read "GPS Visualizer" on

GPS Visualizer

GPS Visualizer is a free utility that creates customizable maps and profiles from GPS data (tracklogs & waypoints), addresses, or coordinates.

based on .csv files of the track logs and simply "dumped" these in Google Earth Pro.

I then simply did screen recordings of the animated playback playing a bit with the time scale to adjust speed.

I am not sure if it would work as good for "3D flight tracks" though. 

Cheers,

Lars

Cheers,

Lars

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 wildlife, but for wild jets that continue to increase over our historic district in Salem, OR.

You can start with KML in Google Earth, but bear in mind that development of Google Earth has been halted.  I've seen hints on something else in the works that Google may announce in the next year or two.  To work with KML, knowing a good scripting language such a Perl or the the snake language will help because you can easily migrate altitude (beware English/metric), latitude, and longitude into the XML structures defined within KML.  That is what I first did.

Then when you start working with points about the earth, you get into the area of spatial reference systems (start with: Wikipedia) and then it becomes evident you will need in your tool box Postgresql with the PostGIS extensions -- both excellent tools which I embrace and recommend whole heartedly and have been using for over a decade (outside of my former employment at the world's largest database company).

QGis with the plugin Qgis2Threejs will be a fun foray into visualizing three dimensions, but development on the plugin has waned and there are shortcomings.

The next step is looking into MapLibre-GL family and Threejs and see each one's "examples" demonstrations -- that probably is the best way to immerse yourself into what these projects can do, combining these two architectures supplants the  Qgis2Threejs approach and currently is my choice of architectures to accomplish the various 2 and 3 dimensional tasks I hope to achieve.  Then you will run into the unfortunate state of affairs of what was once unified open source architecture forking into for profit ventures and an open source alternative.  I am an enthusiastic supporting of open source, having been a Gentoo Linux enthusiast since 2002(?).

Right now I've prototyped some pretty amazing animated diagrams and maps, but it took me as a retired software developer months to get where I am.  I don't want to discourage you, but at the same time I want you to realize that the journey is a long one filled with a variety of technologies that have been affected to politics (for-profit vs. non-profit).  I grimace when I see in the United States how ESRI has just monopolized the map world - very few governments dare to venture outside of ESRI, it reminds me of the old saying from the 1960s, "you can't get fired for buying IBM".  

In summary, there is technology out here that can do marvelous things and is waiting to be harnessed, but it will take a real commitment and have some tools, e.g. a Linux server, available to you as you learn about the tools and the capabilities and shortcomings.  Much of which approach you take will depend upon your knowledge and ability (and ability to learn) of software and operating systems.  I feel as if i could teach several semester courses on this topic given what I have learned.

Just a few things to watch out for:

• English vs. metric.  In aviation, altitudes are emitted as units of feet, but in Google Earth and Postgis, altitude is metric.
• spatial reference SRS of the data and the model you're working in, you need to make sure apples are apples.
• Open source fatigue -- a once well attended-to project can quickly become abandoned or neglected by its developer and as standards change, become incompatible
• Blender - a 3D modeler is extremely complicated, I asked ChatGPT how long it would take to become proficient and it responded 1-2 years.  But if you are focused on wildlife, and not jets, then Blender may not be an avenue to pursue.

And as a closing note, I have found ChatGPT to be invaluable -- however, it can be stubbornly wrong -- it's like having a pupil or a supporting team member.  I recommend you consider giving ChatGPT a try as you dive into technologies, I've found it invaluable for SQL (Structured Query Language used in databases).  ChatGPT can provide a breadth and answers which otherwise might take many hours to learn about.  I've almost become evangelical about it -- the leaps and bounds I've made in my mapping/animation projects comes from the assistance I obtained from ChatGPT (Google's Gemini, by the way, continues to disappoint many times).

@cmwainaina please take a look

Not what you asked for (sorry), but if they are cryptic then a possible first step could be to deploy capacitive sensors everywhere, to get a sense of where they like to hang out and when.  I'm thinking of TTP223 touch sensors attached to a data logger.

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) technology and our antenna read distance is greater than 3cm (dependant on orientation of the antenna to the RFID chip it ranges between 3.8 - 15.3 cm). The first prototype was tested locally with house mice (see Ross et al 2022) and the second prototype was tested on an isolated off shore island to monitor 3 translocated species (this work is currently being written up). We are now working on securing more funding to use satellite connectivity for deployment in even more remote locations. 

Flick me an email and I can send our paper and slides from a conference the work was presented at.

https://doi.org/10.3390/automation3030022