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WILDLABS logoWildlabs.net : The conservation technology network

Group

Animal Movement / Feed

Animal movement technologies are revolutionizing our understanding of wildlife, revealing insights like migration patterns, key corridors, and the impacts of mounting pressures on natural systems. As we continue to develop these tools and work toward translating movement data into actionable insights, coordination between efforts is essential. This group is a place for the animal movement community to connect and discuss our efforts to advance the field.

Group curators

event

AniMove Summer School 2023

Stephanie O'Donnell

10 February 2023 1:19pm

AniMove is a collective of international researchers with extensive experience in the topics of animal movement analysis, remote sensing and conservation. AniMove is a two-week intensive training course for studying...

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New tutorial on Firetail 10 - annotation of acceleration data

Tobias Petri

8 February 2023 12:18pm

Hi! I created a new tutorial video on how to annotate high density acceleration data using Firetail 10 (www.firetail.de). In particular, I cover * how to automatically segment your data * how to edit and modify annotations * how to transfer models across individuals * how...

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discussion

Telemetry and tracking Snakes

Huascar Bustillos Cayoja

30 January 2023 2:44pm

Telemetry and Tracking  SnakesHi everyone , am improving a project about spacial ecology on viper snakes of Lachesis genera. We dont know wich tecnology for tracking its more...

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Robin Poches

2 February 2023 1:47pm

Hi Huascar, how are you? there's limitations on snakes since their body form and behaviour, if you leave a VHF or GPS tag as an external fixation it will get tangled with roths and branches and it will fall, besides you have to suture and it can cause infections.

So far you only got implanted VHF transmitters, that's the most common, lonlasting and safe fixation method.

There's an alternative of using Tegaderm as a external fixation method but with ecdysis will eventually remove it.

any doubts please write me robinpoches@gmail.com

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discussion

Repository for 3D models of tracking devices

Yvan Satgé

14 September 2017 2:29pm

Hello everybody, This message is to start a repository for printable 3D models of tracking devices. It is never easy to get an idea of the size and...

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Yvan Satgé

3 October 2017 6:33pm

3D model of custome-made GeoTrak GT-65GS-GPS with slanted front face (adapted from http://www.geotrakinc.com/products/solarGPS/PTT-65g-solarGPS.html).

Known flaws: Size and shape of attachment loops are not correct: the actual material is too thin to allow for a strong 3D printing so I decided to make the loops thicker; the actual loop hole is also slightly wider. Base of antenna is shorter than actual one. Actual device has smoother angles and slightly convex top (where the solar panels are).

The 3D print will need to be sanded to smoothen the edges and to get the soft angles of the original design. I also designed the tag with a hole where the back solar panels should be: this is to add weight (metals nuts and bolts) to reach a final mass of 65g.

Attached files: 

gt-65gs-gps_slanted_3d.skp_.pdf: SketchUp 2016 file. Change file name back to .skp

gt-65gs-gps_slanted_for_3d_print.stl_.pdf: Printing file. Change file name back to .stl

Yvan

Rob Appleby

20 September 2018 6:01pm

Hi Yvan,

Steph directed me to this awesome resource. These units look so well made! Are you potting in the solar panels? Also, if you are interested, we've been working on a timed drop-off for avian tracking devices similar to this, which I am happy to share details about. 

Anyway, in the spirit of your efforts, we've uploaded some collar housing designs and associated .stl files to our Website here: https://www.wildspy.com.au/resources.php

Shall add more as we design more. 

Great initiative Yvan!

Cheers,

Rob

 

Yvan Satgé

19 January 2023 10:38pm

I Rob, I just saw your message today (19 Jan 2023)! It's a bit late to reply but I wanted to make sure the tag manufacturer got the credit on the quality of their work. I'm not the manufacturer (just a user): these are made by Keith LeSage at Geotrak Inc, North Carolina, USA. We've beein working with them for about 10 years now and all their tags are as good looking as these. 

https://geotrakinc.com/
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Firetail Fellowships

Tobias Petri

19 January 2023 12:11pm

I'm a software engineer/data scientist at Schäuffelhut Berger. We're developing Firetail a software for GPS and acceleration visualization and behavioral annotation. We have just launched our Firetail Fellowship Program which may be a great way to get access to a full...

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https://www.firetail.de/fellowships
discussion

Interview for Technologies in Conservation

Nikolas

24 November 2022 10:07am

Dear Wildlabs community, my name is Nikolas and I am a Master's Student from Lisbon. Like many of you, I grew up with a great passion for the wildlife that we are surrounded...

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Carly Batist

16 January 2023 2:42pm

I'd be happy to chat with you if you wanted! My expertise is within passive acoustic monitoring particularly. The Conservation Tech Directory might be useful for you in identifying relevant actors within the space.

Pen-Yuan Hsing

17 January 2023 5:12pm

My original background is in ecology and conservation, and am now in the elected leadership of the Gathering for Open Science Hardware which convenes researchers developing open source tech for science. I am not working on a specific piece of technology right now, but am happy to contribute some higher-level views for your interview if that helps.

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discussion

Wildlife Telemetry Podcasts

Lars Holst Hansen

9 January 2023 11:49am

While browsing through the producers of wildlife telemetry, I was wondering if there were any podcasts out there on wildlife telemetry and the companies.Indeed there is!I have...

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discussion

NomaTrack and the LoRa-DTN protocol

Lars Holst Hansen

27 February 2021 11:58pm

I just stumbled upon this report on using LoRa in Reindeer husbandry in Scandinavia wich could be useful for wildlife uses too. "The NomaTrack design combines the...

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Jared Marley

26 March 2021 8:26pm

LoRA is registered in most places. With Starlink offering more and more service it would be possible in the future to transmit remote images through satellite once it is available in Madagascar. Power consumption of Starlink is big though.

Lars Holst Hansen

4 January 2023 2:07pm

Hi Carly!

Since LoRa and LoRaWAN are meant for low bandwidth data it is not really feasible to use for transmitting remote audio and image data. It could be very valuable to have metadata like battery levels and trap "levelness" sent back to get an idea of the power and physical state of the traps. I am dreaming of something like this for our remote camera traps used for monitoring arctic fox dens in Greenland. They are not rarely turned over by muskox and polar bear and we are consequently loosing important data.

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discussion

Designing non-standard tracking collars

John Probert

6 January 2017 8:40pm

Hello,   I'm wondering if anyone in this community has designed tracking collars for species that a standard conventional collar might not work for, and if so, are...

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Blake Allan

24 February 2017 11:36pm

Hi,

i've build collars for quite a few "non-standard" collared species. I tend to modify cheap consumer GPS devices to do so. It's a few years old now, but attached is a link to a video I made on modifying GPS devices for wildlife.

https://youtu.be/UaSvS0grVjw

feel free to email me with any specific questions you have.

 

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discussion

GPS collars for goats

Sara

15 February 2022 3:45pm

Hi everyone, WILDLABS newbie, so please bear with me. Currently inherited a project focusing on making grazing better managed / more sustainable on a tiny (67 sqkm),...

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Kim Lane

19 August 2022 2:00am

We were the world first commercial direct to satellite ear tag. There are collar base solutions that work direct to satellite. 

Lars Holst Hansen

3 January 2023 7:40pm

I have no experience with LoraWAN tracking myself but just wanted share a few relevant links for a LoraWAN wildlife use case and a few suppliers of LoraWAN trackers:

https://www.hilashamon.com/lora-technology-for-wildlife-tracking/

An alternative to LoraWAN could be UHF based systems like:

http://www.xeriustracking.fr/bioloc-transmitters/

 

10 min fix intervals is quite high. You may need solar powered devices to keep up this high frequency.

Good luck!

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discussion

Margo Luminous Beta Launch: New Tracking Collar Manufacturer

Jared Marley

20 February 2020 5:30pm

Hi Wildlabs Community, Very excited to announce that we've released the beta version of our new Luminous tracking collar! Our beta release is already nearly fully...

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Lars Holst Hansen

3 January 2023 5:05pm

Thanks Brett! I am not looking to buy anything any time soon but I am always curious to follow any new progress and developments in the market of biologgers.

Regarding the accelerometry I am curious to know which frequencies are supported. Have you considered magnetometry, too? This could obviously be useful in dead reckoning but also for inferring behavioural states (as shown in this paper).

Brett Muir

3 January 2023 5:36pm

No problem. I believe Jared was wanting to share more about our experience developing a collar on Wildlabs when there is time. I'm more on the mechanical end of things. Right now we are focused on reliability and longevity. Thanks for the paper I'll check it out! 

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discussion

Workshop Invite: Building Partnerships between Conservation Tech and the UK Space Sector

Stephanie O'Donnell

22 September 2022 3:50pm

Hi everyone, In collaboration with our partners over at the Satellite Applications Catapult, we are hosting an in person workshop to build strategic partnerships for...

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Vance Russell

5 December 2022 3:10pm

Hi Steph,

If it's not too late, I'm very interested in this workshop.

Best,

V

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careers

Shark Lab Data Analyst

Carly Batist

24 October 2022 7:12pm

This position (at California State University, Long Beach) provides data management & analysis support to Shark Lab research operations including shark tagging, active tracking, receiver data, AUV & UAV data...

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discussion

Water leakage in aquatic tags at deeper depths

Hari

12 October 2022 12:37pm

Hi FolksDoes anyone have experience building their own aquatic tags? We are building a GPS-LoRa telemetry system. Although all the functions are working properly, we are having...

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Thomas Gray

21 October 2022 4:12pm

I'll add -  avoid fast curing resins/epoxies for, at least, two reasons: 

1. The exothermic reaction between the two compounds can cause sensor issues (ie: heat).

2. Air bubbles will form (and cure) more easily in fast curing compounds.

Hari

23 October 2022 2:51pm

Thanks Thomas!! We do use slow curing resins with no heat generation

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discussion

Rainforest SigFox available for use

Roland Kays

26 August 2022 6:09pm

Hi EveryoneJust FYI that right now we now have a SigFox gateway running to create an IoT network at the Los Amigos field station in lowland Peruvian Amazon.  Amazing forest,...

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Carly Batist

26 September 2022 10:20pm

Hi Roland,

This is really amazing, great to hear about your set-up! I'm just wondering what the overall cost was to set up this system? Just thinking in terms of setting up something similar in other parks and what they should expect with regard to price. Would also be great to hear about the overall effort, e.g., hours/team members required. It would be great to have this act as a blueprint for other organizations/research stations wishing to deploy a similar system within their respective national parks/areas/etc.! 

Antoine Ede

10 October 2022 8:33am

Hi Rolland,

Interested too, but why did you choose SigFox (a private network) rather than LoRa (open network)? 

Sigfox currently has some financial troubles that, don't know what it will become in the long term.

Roland Kays

18 October 2022 11:55am

Hi Everyone,

We chose sigfox becuase it seems to have better range and is plug-play, whereas LoRa requires more custom programming and updating.  Getting a gateway cost us $2000 for a year's lease + deposit. We covered solar power.  There are also some 'minigateways' you can purchase but I don't know how they compare in range (plan to test).  So far we are happy with the performance, in that it has worked consistency with no outages  (once we stabilized the power supply).  I think the annual costs are about $10 per tag.  We are working on a paper that will describe this in more detail.  So far just using for tracking tags but also looking at a trap sensor.

cheers

Roland

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New paper: Benthic animal-borne sensors & citizen science combine to validate ocean modelling

Carly Batist

10 October 2022 4:15pm

"We develop the use of benthic species as animal oceanographers by combining archival (depth, temperature) data from animal-borne tags, passive acoustic telemetry & citizen-science mark-recapture records for the flapper skate in Scotland."

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Read "Benthic animal-borne sensors and citizen science combine to validate ocean modelling | Scientific Reports" on Nature

Benthic animal-borne sensors and citizen science combine to validate ocean modelling | Scientific Reports

Developments in animal electronic tagging and tracking have transformed the field of movement ecology, but interest is also growing in the contributions of tagged animals to oceanography. Animal-borne sensors can address data gaps, improve ocean model skill and support model validation, but previous studies in this area have focused almost exclusively on satellite-telemetered seabirds and seals. Here, for the first time, we develop the use of benthic species as animal oceanographers by combining archival (depth and temperature) data from animal-borne tags, passive acoustic telemetry and citizen-science mark-recapture records from 2016–17 for the Critically Endangered flapper skate (Dipturus intermedius) in Scotland. By comparing temperature observations to predictions from the West Scotland Coastal Ocean Modelling System, we quantify model skill and empirically validate an independent model update. The results from bottom-temperature and temperature-depth profile validation (5,324 observations) fill a key data gap in Scotland. For predictions in 2016, we identified a consistent warm bias (mean = 0.53 °C) but a subsequent model update reduced bias by an estimated 109% and improved model skill. This study uniquely demonstrates the use of benthic animal-borne sensors and citizen-science data for ocean model validation, broadening the range of animal oceanographers in aquatic environments.

Nature
discussion

Humidity/Temperature/Light Level logger

David Bradley

27 September 2022 12:01am

I am looking for a small logger that can collect humidity, temperature, and light levels while being hung from a fishing line over a cliff. I have found units that can collect the...

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Rick Jordan

7 October 2022 4:50pm

Hi David,

I've used our monitoring platform, PRTG (www.paessler.com), with environmental sensors for a server room, which included temperature and humidity. The monitoring platform is free up to a certain amount of sensors, so if this would be all you were using it for then it would be completely free of cost. Some hardware devices for environmental monitoring they have listed in one of their knowledge base articles are listed below, none of which I've used, but perhaps one of these would work, and if not, it will put you on the right track if you wanted to pursue this type of solution for what you are looking to do:

"All of these vendors offer physical sensors that can provide data about their environment. Connected to some kind of SNMP-enabled “management box” these sensors become network-enabled."

Cheers!

Rick

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