Surfing NASA’s Internet of Animals: Satellites Study Ocean Wildlife
July 13th, 2024
Via Terra Daily, a look at the use of satellites to study wildlife: Anchoring the boat in a sandbar, research scientist Morgan Gilmour steps into the shallows and is immediately surrounded by sharks. The warm waters around the tropical island act as a reef shark nursery, and these baby biters are curious about the newcomer. […]
Read More »‘Find My Friends for Rhinos’: How High-Tech Tracking is Keeping Tabs on Wildlife
May 21st, 2024
Via CNN, a look at how, in Northern Kenya’s Sera Conservancy, veterinarians have been using a conservation technology tool called EarthRanger to track and monitor wildlife:
It’s early morning in Sera Community Conservancy in Northern Kenya and sunlight beats down across this expansive semi-arid landscape. Birds calling and boots crunching are the only sounds for miles as a team led by Kenyan wildlife veterinarian Dr. Mukami Ruoro-Oundo carefully tracks white rhinos — the first of their kind to be found here in Samburu County.
Once common in the area, by the early 1990s Northern Kenya’s rhino population was decimated by poaching. But the country’s black rhino population has more than doubled since 1989, and by December 2022 there were 1,900 black rhinos and white rhinos in total, according to Kenya Wildlife Services.
Sera Conservancy has championed the country’s community-led rhino conservation efforts. In 2015 it established East Africa’s first community rhino sanctuary with the introduction of 10 critically endangered black rhinos. Today, that number has grown to 21 black rhinos which freely roam across 107 square kilometers (41 square miles) of designated sanctuary land, and in February 2024, they were joined by four white rhinos from the nearby Lewa Conservancy.
As she searches on foot, Dr. Ruoro-Oundo spots two of the female white rhinos. One, called Sarah, looks heavily pregnant but as the vet creeps closer she notices something is very wrong.
Mindful of not encroaching too long on the rhinos’ territory and reluctant to intervene unnecessarily, she opts for a different approach; through a conservation technology tool called EarthRanger she can monitor Sarah’s movements in real time from a distance.
Prior to translocation, each of the four white rhinos was fitted with a GPS tag in its horns and ears, which sends a real-time location to remote devices like mobile phones, or to the conservancy’s operations center, where Dr. Ruoro-Oundo is able to monitor Sarah’s location and movements.
As EarthRanger’s co-founder Jake Wall tells CNN, “It’s exactly like a ‘Find my Friends’ for rhino.”
Sparse internet connectivity means Dr. Ruoro-Oundo cannot get a clear signal from Sarah’s transmitter but thankfully Sarah is not alone; a female rhino named Arot has never left her side and through Arot’s transmitter Dr. Ruoro-Oundo can see that Sarah has barely moved in hours, suggesting her condition is deteriorating. By using a drone to take photos of her, the team is able to confirm that Sarah urgently needs help.
“We noticed she has a fecal impaction, it was quite huge and had made the rectal and vulvar area swollen,” says Dr. Ruoro-Oundo. “She’s in a lot of pain because she could not put down her tail, and you could see she was a bit sluggish, she really wanted to spend her time lying down. So in such a case we really need to intervene for her comfort, to relieve her of the distress and the pain.”
An emergency intervention is immediately put into action, led by Kenya Wildlife Services and Sera Conservancy’s management and rangers. Air, ground and additional veterinary support are mobilized within hours — potentially saving not only Sarah’s life but that of her unborn calf too.
For Dr. Ruoro-Oundo, the key to safeguarding Kenya’s wildlife is a balance between community and technology.
“I think you cannot separate technology from conservation in the future,” she says.” The human element can never be removed, but technology will always come to assist where we cannot reach.”
A global effort
Now used in 70 countries, EarthRanger’s story started in Kenya when co-founder Wall was researching elephants there.
“In about 2012, we had a real crisis with poaching in Kenya, so we wanted a way that we could pick up on elephants that were getting killed, and the sign for us was that the collar stopped moving for more than about five or six hours, which is the longest sort of period that an elephant rests for,” he recalls.
“So I wrote the algorithm that could work out whether an elephant had stopped moving or not, and then (the collar) would send an SMS if it had. So that was kind of the beginning.”
He adds that the system has evolved quite significantly since then, and Sarah is one of 9,000 animals — including elephants, lions, giraffe, tortoises, sea turtles and 1,200 rhinos — that EarthRanger is currently tracking in Kenya alone.
Wall says the system can integrate data from more than 100 different devices — “anything from elephant trackers to ear tags for rhino, to collars for lions, tail tags (for giraffes), devices that glue onto the shell of a turtle.”
It can also receive information from sources such as vehicle trackers, satellites, and remote sensing alerts for things like deforestation and fire. “It’s pulling it all into one platform, where it can be readily visualized, analyzed and then acted upon,” Wall adds. “And all of that’s giving the operators and managers a bird’s eye view of the situation as it’s happening, with real-time tools.”
According to the EarthRanger, all of these devices are designed to be lightweight, durable and inconspicuous ensuring they don’t impact on the animals’ natural behavior or cause them discomfort. For rhinos, Dr. Ruoro-Oundo says that attaching a tracker is the equivalent sensation of a human getting their ears pierced.
Samuel Lekimaroro, a wildlife protection manager for the Northern Rangelands Trust, which includes Sera Conservancy, uses this kind of data to live-track terrestrial and marine wildlife across 6.5 million hectares. For Lekimaroro it has become a powerful tool in translocating wildlife, data collection and security operations, including identifying hotspots for human-wildlife conflict.
“Thanks to EarthRanger, trophy poaching has been on a steady decline for the last five years, from a high of 120 elephants poached in 2012, to zero in the last four years in (our) member conservancies,” he says.
Wall says its potential to securely collect and share data from different EarthRanger sites from across the world is revolutionary.
“If organizations are doing, say, joint patrolling, or monitoring of a species, then they can also share that information,” he says. “By storing information on EarthRanger we can pull that data from different sites and combine it in ways that was never possible before. So it’s really enabling the analysis and the reporting in a way that just never existed before.”
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Read More »Wearables For The Wild and An Internet of Animals: How Tracking Animal Movements May Save The Planet
February 23rd, 2024
Courtesy of MIT Technology Review, a report on how researchers have been dreaming of an Internet of Animals and are now getting closer to monitoring 100,000 creatures—and revealing hidden facets of our shared world:
There was something strange about the way the sharks were moving between the islands of the Bahamas.
Tiger sharks tend to hug the shoreline, explains marine biologist Austin Gallagher, but when he began tagging the 1,000-pound animals with satellite transmitters in 2016, he discovered that these predators turned away from it, toward two ancient underwater hills made of sand and coral fragments that stretch out 300 miles toward Cuba. They were spending a lot of time “crisscrossing, making highly tortuous, convoluted movements” to be near them, Gallagher says.
It wasn’t immediately clear what attracted sharks to the area: while satellite images clearly showed the subsea terrain, they didn’t pick up anything out of the ordinary. It was only when Gallagher and his colleagues attached 360-degree cameras to the animals that they were able to confirm what they were so drawn to: vast, previously unseen seagrass meadows—a biodiverse habitat that offered a smorgasbord of prey.
The discovery did more than solve a minor mystery of animal behavior. Using the data they gathered from the sharks, the researchers were able to map an expanse of seagrass stretching across 93,000 square kilometers of Caribbean seabed—extending the total known global seagrass coverage by more than 40%, according to a study Gallagher’s team published in 2022. This revelation could have huge implications for efforts to protect threatened marine ecosystems—seagrass meadows are a nursery for one-fifth of key fish stocks and habitats for endangered marine species—and also for all of us above the waves, as seagrasses can capture carbon up to 35 times faster than tropical rainforests.
Animals have long been able to offer unique insights about the natural world around us, acting as organic sensors picking up phenomena that remain invisible to humans. More than 100 years ago, leeches signaled storms ahead by slithering out of the water; canaries warned of looming catastrophe in coal mines until the 1980s; and mollusks that close when exposed to toxic substances are still used to trigger alarms in municipal water systems in Minneapolis and Poland.
These days, we have more insight into animal behavior than ever before thanks to sensor tags, which have helped researchers answer key questions about globe-spanning migrations and the sometimes hard-to-reach places animals visit along the way. In turn, tagged animals have increasingly become partners in scientific discovery and planetary monitoring.
But the data we gather from these animals still adds up to only a relatively narrow slice of the whole picture. Results are often confined to silos, and for many years tags were big and expensive, suitable only for a handful of animal species—like tiger sharks—that are powerful (or large) enough to transport them.
This is beginning to change. Researchers are asking: What will we find if we follow even the smallest animals? What if we could monitor a sample of all the world’s wildlife to see how different species’ lives intersect? What could we learn from a big-data system of animal movement, continuously monitoring how creatures big and small adapt to the world around us? It may be, some researchers believe, a vital tool in the effort to save our increasingly crisis-plagued planet.
Wearables for the wild
Just a few years ago, a project called ICARUS seemed ready to start answering the big questions about animal movement.
A team led by Martin Wikelski, a director at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in southern Germany and a pioneer in the field, launched a new generation of affordable and lightweight GPS sensors that could be worn by animals as small as songbirds, fish, and rodents.
These Fitbits for wild creatures, to use Wikelski’s analogy, could produce live location data accurate to a few meters and simultaneously allow scientists to monitor animals’ heart rates, body heat, and sudden movements, plus the temperature, humidity, and air pressure in their surroundings. The signals they transmitted would be received by a three-meter antenna affixed to the International Space Station—the result of a €50 million investment from the German Aerospace Centre and the Russian Space Agency—and beamed down to a data bank on Earth, producing a map of the animals’ paths in close to real time as they crisscrossed the globe.
Wikelski and his peers hoped the project, formally the International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space, would provide insights about a much wider variety of animals than they’d previously been able to track. It also aimed to show proof of concept for Wikelski’s dream of the past several decades: the Internet of Animals—a big-data system that monitors and analyzes animal behavior to help us understand the planet and predict the future of the environment.
Researchers have been laying the groundwork for years, connecting disparate data sets on animal movement, the environment, and weather and analyzing them with the help of AI and automated analytics. But Wikelski had his sights on something even grander and more comprehensive: a dashboard in which 100,000 sensor-tagged animals could be simultaneously monitored as near-real-time data flowed in from Earth-imaging satellites and ground-based sources.
By bringing together each of these snapshots of animals’ lives, we might begin to understand the forces that are shaping life across the planet. The project had the potential to help us better understand and conserve the world’s most vulnerable species, showing how animals are responding to the challenges of climate change and ecosystem loss. It also promised another way to monitor the Earth itself during a period of increasing instability, transforming our animal co-inhabitants into sentinels of a changing world.
When ICARUS first went into space in 2018, it was widely celebrated in the press. Yet what should have been a moment of glory for Wikelski and the field of animal ecology instead became a test of his will. The ICARUS antenna first went down for a year because of a technical issue; it went back up but was only just out of testing in February 2022 when the Russian invasion of Ukraine halted the project altogether.
Wikelski and his peers, though, have used the time since to innovate and evangelize. They now envision a more complete and technologically advanced version of the Internet of Animals than the one they hoped to build even just a few years ago, thanks to innovations in tracking technologies and AI and satellite systems. They have made even smaller and cheaper sensors and found a new, more affordable way to work in space with microsatellites called CubeSats. Their efforts have even gotten NASA to invest its time and resources into the possibility of building the Internet of Animals.
Now Wikelski and his collaborators are again on the verge, with an experimental CubeSat successfully transmitting data as part of a testing phase that started last June. If all goes as planned, another fully operational ICARUS CubeSat will begin collecting data next year, with more launches to follow.
The potential benefits of this system are extraordinary and still not yet fully understood, says Scott Yanco, a researcher in movement ecology at the University of Michigan. Perhaps it could help prevent mountain lion attacks or warn about a zoonotic disease about to make a jump to humans. It could alert researchers of behavioral changes that seem to happen in some animals before earthquakes, a phenomenon Wikelski has studied, and determine what conditions tell boobies in the Indo-Pacific to lay fewer eggs in years before strong El Niños or signal to weaver birds in the Niger Delta to build their nests higher up before floods.
“You can talk to 100 scientists about this,” Yanco says, “and they’re all going to give you a different answer of what they’re interested in.”
But first, a lot still needs to go right.
Animals as sentinels
When I first spoke with Wikelski, in early 2022, ICARUS was live, tracking 46 species from the ISS 400 kilometers overhead. Wearing a pair of square-rimmed glasses and speaking in a German accent with a tone of unfailing urgency, he was excited to tell me about a tagged blackbird who made a 1,000-or-so-kilometer crossing from Belarus to Albania.
That was actually pretty routine, Wikelski said, but almost everything else he had been seeing over the past year of road-testing had been stranger than expected. White storks were crossing back and forth over the Sahara five times a season, without apparent reason. Cuckoos, which are tree-dwelling birds ill suited to long periods at sea, were making uninterrupted journeys from India to the Horn of Africa. “Now, any time you look, totally novel aspects appear, and novel connections appear across continents,” he told me.
This could have been a mystifying mess. But for Wikelski, it was “beautiful data.”
The practice of tagging animals to monitor their movements has been used for more than 100 years, though it began with a stroke of luck. In the 1820s, a hunter in a village in central Africa threw a 30-inch spear that lodged itself nonfatally in the neck of a white stork. This became what might have been the world’s first tag on a wild animal, says Yanco: the bird somehow flew back to Germany in the spring, helping settle the mystery of where storks disappeared to in the winter.
By the 1890s, scientists had started tracking wild birds with bands fitted around their legs—but 49 out of every 50 ring-tagged birds were never seen again. Starting in the 1960s, thousands of birds received very-high-frequency radio tags known as “pingers,” but these were only powerful enough to broadcast a few kilometers. To capture the data, researchers had to embark on cartoonish chase scenes, in which tagged birds were pursued by an oversize homing antenna pointed out the roof of a car, plane, or hang-glider.
Wikelski tried all three. During a stint at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in the mid-’90s, he was studying thrushes and would gun an Oldsmobile around the Midwest at over 70 miles per hour. He’d set off as the songbirds got going at around 2 a.m., which tended to draw the attention of local police. Wikelski found that contrary to the conventional wisdom, thrushes used just 29% of their energy on their overnight migrations, less than they expended hunting and sheltering during stopovers. But the hassle of his process, which also entailed capturing and recapturing birds to weigh them, convinced Wikelski that, among other things, he needed better tools.
Thinking bigger (and higher)
It was not immediately clear that the solution to Wikelski’s problems would be in space, though the idea of tracking animals via satellite had been explored decades before his Oldsmobile experiments.
In fact, NASA invented space-based animal tracking back in 1970 when it strapped a transmitter collar the weight of two bowling balls around the neck of Monique the Space Elk, a local news celebrity at the time. (Monique was actually two elks: the anointed Monique, who wore a dummy collar for testing and press photos, and another, who accidentally caught a misfired tranquilizer dart and subsequently got the satellite transmitter collar.) After the Moniques met untimely deaths—one from starvation, the other at the hands of a hunter—the project went dormant too.
But its research lived on in Argos, a weather monitoring system established in 1978 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the French space agency. It pioneered a way to track a tagged animal’s location by beaming up a short stream of analog data and measuring wave compression—the so-called Doppler shift—as a polar-orbiting satellite zoomed overhead at thousands of miles an hour. But this captured locations to only a few hundred meters, at best, and typically required a clear line of sight between tag and satellite—a challenge when working with animals below the canopy of rainforests, for instance.
Wikelski worked extensively with Argos but found that the technology didn’t enable him to capture the highly detailed whole-life data he craved. By the late ’90s, he was on an island in Panama, exploring an alternative approach that followed hundreds of animals from 38 species, including small mammals and insects.
Using six long-distance radio towers, Wikelski and Roland Kays, now the director of the Biodiversity Laboratory at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, started to develop the Automated Radio Telemetry System (ARTS), a radio collar tracking system that could penetrate thick canopy. Crucially, ARTS revealed interactions between species—for example, how predatory ocelots support the island’s palm trees by eating large quantities of rabbit-like agoutis, after the rodents bury palm seeds underground as a snack for later. The researchers also found that despite what everyone believed, many of the animal inhabitants don’t remain on the island year-round, but frequently travel to the mainland. Kays and Wikelski had demonstrated in microcosm the kinds of insights that fine-grained multispecies tracking could provide even in challenging environments.
But Wikelski was frustrated that he couldn’t follow animals off the map. “If we don’t know the fate of an animal, we will never be able to really do good biology,” he says. The only solution would be to have a map with no edge.
This was around the time that GPS trackers became small enough to be used in animal tags. While radio tags like those used by Argos estimated location by transmitting signals to receivers, GPS systems like those in cars download data from three or more satellites to triangulate location precisely.
Wikelski became a man possessed by the idea of using this technology to create a truly global animal monitoring system. He envisioned digital tags that could capture GPS data throughout the day and upload packets of data to satellites that would periodically pass overhead. This idea would generate both excitement and a lot of skepticism. Peers told Wikelski that his dream system was unrealistic and unworkable.
At the turn of the millennium, he took a position at Princeton with the notion that the institutional pedigree might earn an audience for his “crazy” idea. Not long after he arrived, the chief of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory came for a talk, and Wikelski asked whether the agency would benefit from a satellite system that could track birds. “He looked at me as if I came from a different planet,” Wikelski remembers. Still, he got a meeting with NASA—though he says he was laughed out of the building. By this time, the agency had apparently forgotten all about Monique.
Undeterred, in 2002 Wikelski launched ICARUS, a half-joke (for fans of Greek mythology) at his own immodest ambitions. It aimed to use digital GPS tags and satellites that would relay the information to a data center on Earth nearly as instantly as the ARTS system had.
Wikelski’s big ideas continued to run into big doubts. “At the time, people told us technology-wise, it will never work,” he says. Even 10 years ago, when Wikelski was making proposals to space agencies, he was told to avoid digital tech altogether in favor of tried-and-tested Argos-style communication. “Don’t go digital!” he recalls people telling him. “This is completely impossible! You have to do it analog.”
Moving away from the fringe
In the two decades since ICARUS was established, the scientific community has caught up, thanks to developments in consumer tech. The Internet of Things made two-way digital communications with small devices viable, while lithium batteries have shrunk to sizes that more animals can carry and smartphones have made low-cost GPS and accelerometers increasingly available.
“We’re going from where we couldn’t really track most vertebrate species on the planet to flipping it. We’re now able to track most things,” says Yanco, emphasizing that this is possible “to varying degrees of accuracy and resolution.”
The other key advance has been in data systems, and in particular the growth of Movebank, a central repository of animal tracking data that was developed from Wikelski’s ARTS system. Movebank brings together terrestrial-animal tracking data from various streams, including location data from the Argos system and from new high-res digital satellites, like ICARUS’s antenna on the ISS. (There are also plans to incorporate CubeSat data.) To date, it has collected 6 billion data points from more than 1,400 species, tracking animals’ full life cycles in ways that Wikelski once could only dream about. It is now a key part of the plumbing of the animal internet.
The field also had some practical successes, which in turn allowed it to marshal additional resources. In 2016 in London, for instance, where air pollution was responsible for nearly 10,000 human deaths a year, researchers from Imperial College and the tech startup Plume Labs released 10 racing pigeons equipped with sensors for nitrogen dioxide and ozone emissions from traffic. Daily updates (tweeted out by the Pigeon Air Patrol account) showed how taking a pigeon’s path through the neighborhoods revealed pollution hot spots that weather stations missed.
Diego Ellis Soto, a NASA research fellow and a Yale PhD candidate studying animal ecology, highlights an experiment from 2018: flocks of storks were outfitted with high-resolution GPS collars to monitor the air movements they encountered over the open ocean. Tagged storks were able to capture live data on turbulence, which can be notoriously hard for airlines to predict.
Among the critical roles for these animal sensors was one that was once considered eccentric: predicting weather and the world’s fast-changing climate patterns. Animals equipped with temperature and pressure sensors essentially act as free-roaming weather buoys that can beam out readings from areas underserved by weather stations, including polar regions, small islands, and much of the Global South. Satellites struggle to measure many environmental variables, including ocean temperatures, which can also be prohibitively expensive for drones to collect. “Eighty percent of all measurements in Antarctica of sea surface temperature are collected by elephant seals, and not by robots or icebreakers,” Ellis Soto says. “These seals can just swim underneath the ice and [do] stuff that robots can’t do.” The seals are now tagged yearly, and the data they collect helps refine weather models that predict El Niño and sea-level rise.
When the ICARUS antenna was installed on the ISS in August 2018, it seemed poised to unlock even more capabilities and discoveries. In the antenna’s short life, the project recorded the movements of bats, birds, and antelope in near-real time, from Alaska to the islands of Papua New Guinea, and transferred the data to Movebank. But when the experiment ground to a premature halt, Wikelski knew he’d have to do something different, and he concocted a plan by which ICARUS could continue—whether it could rely on a major space agency or not.
Another shot
Rather than a system of major satellites, the new incarnation of ICARUS will run on CubeSats: low-cost, off-the-shelf microsatellites launched into low Earth orbit (around the same height as the ISS) for around $800,000, meaning even developing nations that harbor space ambitions can be part of the project. CubeSats also offer the benefit of truly global coverage; the ISS’s orbital path means it can’t pick up signals from polar regions further north than southern Sweden or further south than the tip of Chile.
There’s currently one ICARUS CubeSat in testing, having launched into orbit last summer. If all goes well, a CubeSat funded by the Max Planck Society, in collaboration with the University of the Bundeswehr Munich, will launch next April, followed by another in winter 2025, and—they’re hoping—another in 2026. Each further addition allows the tags to upload once more per day, increasing the temporal resolution and bringing the system closer to truly real-time tracking.
Outfitting even small animals with lightweight, inexpensive GPS sensors, like the one on this blackbird, and monitoring how they move around the world could provide insights into the global effects of climate change.
Wikelski and his partners have also rededicated themselves to making even smaller tags. They’re close to the goal of getting them down to three grams, which would in theory make it possible to track more than half of mammal species and around two-fifths of birds, plus hundreds of species of crocodiles, turtles, and lizards. ICARUS’s tags are also now cheaper (costing just $150) and smarter. ICARUS developed AI-on-chip systems that can reduce the energy use by orders of magnitude to cut down on the size of batteries, Wikelski explains. There are also new tags being tested by scientists from the University of Copenhagen and Wikelski’s institute at Max Planck that harvest energy from animal movements, like a self-winding wristwatch. Finally, these new ICARUS sensors can also be reprogrammed remotely, thanks to their two-way Internet of Things–style communications. A new ecosystem of tag makers—professional and DIY—is further driving down prices, open-sourcing innovation, and allowing experimentation.
Still, not everyone has bought into ICARUS. Critics question the costs compared with those of existing terrestrial monitoring initiatives like MOTUS, a national Canadian bird conservation program that uses a network of 750 receiving towers. Others argue that researchers can make better use of the thousands of animals already tracked by Argos, which is upgrading to more accurate tags and is also set to launch a series of CubeSats. The total cost of a fully realized ICARUS system—100,000 animals at any one time, some of which die or disappear as new ones are tagged—is around $10 million to $15 million a year. “If you’re thinking about how to tag a moose or bighorn sheep, you might need to hire a helicopter and the whole team and the vet,” says Ellis Soto, who has long collaborated with Wikelski. “So the costs can be extremely, extremely limiting.”
But, proponents argue, the initiative would beget a lot more information than other Earth-imaging space missions and be significantly cheaper than sending humans or drones to collect data from remote locations like polar ice sheets. Wikelski also emphasizes that no one entity will bear the cost. He is working with local communities in Bhutan, South Africa, Thailand, China, Russia, and Nigeria and gets requests from people across the world who want to connect tags to ICARUS. With cheap satellites and cheap tags, he sees a route to scale.
Even as ICARUS explores a grassroots future, one of the biggest changes since the initial launch is the backing Internet of Animals technology has received from the biggest giant in the field: NASA. The agency is now two years into a five-year project to explore how it might get more involved in building out such a system. “We’re very much focused on developing future mission concepts that will come after the current set of ICARUS missions,” says Ryan Pavlick, a researcher in remote sensing of biodiversity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In 2024, this will mean “architecture studies” that aim to understand what technical systems might meet the animal-tracking needs of stakeholders including NOAA, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the United States Geological Survey.
While NASA’s project aims to deliver benefits for the American people, a fully realized Internet of Animals would necessarily be global and interspecies. When we spoke in November 2023, Wikelski had just got off the phone discussing how ICARUS can help monitor the global “deal for nature” established by the UN’s COP15 biodiversity conference, whose targets include reducing extinction rates by a factor of 10.
Jill Deppe, who leads the National Audubon Society’s Migratory Bird Initiative, has boundless enthusiasm for how an Internet of Animals could affect organizations like hers. For a century, Audubon has watched migratory birds disappear on journeys to Chile or Colombia. A system that could tell us where birds are dying across the entire Western Hemisphere would allow Audubon to precisely target investments in habitat protection and efforts to address threats, she says.
“Our on-the-ground conservation work is all done on a local scale,” says Deppe. For migratory birds, ICARUS can link these isolated moments into a storyline that spans continents: “How do all of those factors and processes interact? And what does that mean for the birds’ survival?”
Movebank’s live-updating dashboard also makes more dynamic conservation action possible. Beaches can be closed as exhausted shorebirds land, wind farms can halt turbines as bats migrate through, and conservation-conscious farmers—who already aim to flood fields or drain them at times that suit migrating flocks—can do so with real knowledge.
In return, will animals really help us see the future of the planet’s climate?
No one is suggesting that animals take over from the system of satellites, weather stations, balloons, and ocean buoys that currently feed into meteorologists’ complex models. Yet technology that complements these dependable data streams, that captures the ever-changing biological signals of seals, storks, sharks, and other species, is already starting to fill in gaps in our knowledge. Once considered cryptic signs from the fates, or harbingers of doom, their behaviors are messages that have only just begun to show us ways to live on a changing planet.
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How Technology Helps Scientists Protect Giraffes
February 7th, 2024Via Share America, a look at how solar-powered GPS tracking devices affixed to giraffes’ ears allow conservation ecologists to remotely track animals and know when giraffes have strayed from protected areas:
Technology is helping wildlife experts in Africa to protect endangered giraffes and to reintroduce them to areas where they had previously died out.
An estimated 117,000 giraffes remain in the wild, and some species are critically endangered, having suffered from illegal hunting and habitat loss, according to the Giraffe Conservation Foundation. New technologies, including AI software, are helping scientists to recognize specific giraffes based on their unique spot patterns. And satellite imagery is helping conservationists identify suitable habitats for them.
“[We] get glimpses into the lives of giraffes that we previously couldn’t see,” said Michael Brown, a conservation ecologist with the foundation. “These glimpses … inform conservation management.”
Based in Namibia, the foundation and its partners protect giraffes across 40 million hectares in 21 African countries. Giraffes live in areas ranging from lush savanna to sparse desert, and from protected wildlife refuges to lands that put the animals in close contact with people.
Along with partners, including the Virginia-based Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in the United States, the foundation uses GPS (Global Positioning System) devices to track giraffes. EarthRanger, part of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a Seattle-based nonprofit, quickly transmits data to local partners, alerting them to when an animal has strayed from a protected area or stopped moving and thus may need assistance.
In August 2023, Jennifer R. Littlejohn, the U.S. Department of State’s acting assistant secretary of state for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs, met with scientists working on EarthRanger in Seattle and highlighted the importance of conservationists, technologists and government working together to further use of AI and satellite imagery to solve problems facing people and nature.
The ability to recognize spot patterns, which traditionally required scores of volunteers, Brown said, helps researchers accurately count giraffe populations and better understand an animal’s behavior. U.S. researchers use similar technology to recognize North American brown bears by their facial features.
“Knowing them as individuals helps us get a much clearer picture” of how giraffes interact with their habitats, Brown said. That information helps researchers better determine where giraffe populations are likely to increase over time.
Ecologists have successfully moved giraffes to new areas, including lands where they had previously died out. Databases owned by NASA, the U.S. space agency, and by the U.S. Geological Survey provide information from satellite images to determine whether giraffes are likely to thrive. Online tools such as Google Earth also inform the analysis.
“Rapid leaps in the last decade with GPS technology and with satellite imagery,” Brown said, motivate ecologists to continue their efforts.
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Five Revolutionary Technologies Helping Scientists Study Polar Bears
January 13th, 2023Via Smithsonian Magazine, a look at how researchers are using novel technologies to study polar bears, which live in the rapidly warming Arctic:
When they’re born, polar bears are toothless and blind, and they weigh roughly a pound. But over time—thanks to lots of fat-rich milk and protection from their mother—these helpless cubs grow to become large, powerful predators that are perfectly adapted for their Arctic environment. Though temperatures can dip to minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter, the massive marine mammals—which live in Canada, Norway, Russia, Greenland and Alaska—stay warm with a thick layer of body fat and two coats of fur. Their huge paws help them paddle through the icy water and gently walk across sea ice in search of their favorite meal, seals.
Their size, power, intelligence and environmental adaptions have long intrigued humans living in the north, including many Indigenous communities, such as the Inuit, the Ket and the Sámi. Biologists are curious about Ursus maritimus for many of the same reasons.
“Bears are fascinating,” says B.J. Kirschhoffer, director of conservation technology at Polar Bears International. “For me, when standing on a prominent point overlooking sea ice, I want to know how any animal can make a living in that environment. I am curious about everything that makes them able to grow to be the biggest bear by living in one of the harshest places on this planet. There is still so much to learn about the species—how they use energy, how they navigate their world and how they are responding to a rapidly changing environment.”
Today, researchers and conservationists want to know about these highly specialized marine mammals because human-caused climate change is reshaping their Arctic habitat. The bears spend much of their time on sea ice hunting for seals. But as temperatures in the Arctic rise, sea ice is getting thinner, melting earlier in the spring and forming later in the fall. Pollution and commercial activity also threaten the bears and their environment. An estimated 26,000 polar bears roam the northern reaches of the world, and conservationists worry they could disappear entirely by 2100 because of global warming.
But investigating mostly solitary creatures who spend much of their time wandering around sea ice, in some of the most remote and rugged places on the planet, is expensive, logistically challenging and dangerous to researchers. For help, scientists are turning to technology. These five innovations are changing the way they study polar bears.
Sticky tracking devices
Researchers can twist three black bottle brushes into a sedated bear’s fur to attach a triangular plate equipped with a tracking device. 3M
Much of what scientists know about polar bears comes from tracking female members of the species. This is largely due to anatomical differences between the sexes: Males have small heads and thick necks, which means tracking collars can easily slip right off. Females, on the other hand, have larger heads and thinner necks.Neck collars are out of the question for males, and they’re not ideal for young bears, which can quickly outgrow the devices. Other options—like implants—require the bears to undergo minor surgery, which can be potentially risky to their health. Ear tags don’t require surgery, but they are still invasive. They’re also permanent, and polar bear researchers strive to make as minimal an impact on the bears as possible. How, then, can scientists attach tracking devices to young bears and male polar bears?
This was the challenge put to innovators at 3M, the Minnesota-based company that makes everything from medical devices to cleaning supplies to building materials. 3M is particularly good at making things sticky—its flagship products include Post-it Notes and Scotch Tape.
Jon Kirschhoffer spent his nearly 40-year career at 3M as an industrial designer, developing novel solutions to complex problems just like this one. So when B.J. Kirschhoffer, his son, started chatting about the need for a new, noninvasive way of attaching trackers to polar bears, Jon’s wheels started turning. He brought the problem to his colleagues, who set to work studying polar bear fur and building prototypes.
Crimping Device For Polar Bear Fur
One of the most promising designs draws inspiration from the human process of attaching hair extensions. 3M
In the end, they landed on two promising “burr on fur” approaches. One device uses three bottle brushes—small, tubular brushes with a long handle made of twisted metal wire that could fit inside the neck of a skinny bottle—to grab onto clumps of a sedated bear’s fur. They also have the option of applying a two-part epoxy to the bottle brushes to help hold the bear’s fur more securely. Scientists and wildlife managers can use the brushes to firmly attach a triangular plate that contains a tracking device between the animal’s shoulder blades. In tests, the researchers have sedated the animals before attaching the trackers, but some zoos are training their bears to accept the tags while fully alert.“It’s like a burr: You twist and entangle the fur in the bottle brush, then bend over the handle so it doesn’t untwist,” Jon says. “We do that on three sides and put a little protective cap over it so it’s less likely to get snagged on willows and brush and other things that bears walk through.”
The other option draws inspiration from the process hair stylists use to attach hair extensions to their human clients’ heads. This pentagonal design involves extending a loop of a fishing leader down through five metal ferrules, or tubes; lassoing some hair on a sedated polar bear; and pulling it back through. Scientists can then use pliers to squeeze and crimp the hair in place.
Researchers are testing both devices on wild bears in Churchill, Manitoba, and on bears housed at zoos and aquariums. The verdict is still out on which option is better, and Polar Bears International expects the testing phase to last several more years. Ultimately, by making design modifications based on their experimental learnings, they hope to tweak the devices so they will stick to the bears’ fur for at least 270 days, which is the lifespan of the tracking devices themselves.
But even if they can’t get the sticky devices to stay attached to bears for the full 270 days, the gadgets will still be useful for gathering some amount of data on males and young bears, which is currently lacking. They’re also promising for short-term tracking situations, such as “when a bear has entered a community, been captured and released, and we want to monitor the animal to ensure it doesn’t re-enter the community,” says B.J.
“Bear-dar” detection systems
Radar Tower For Detecting Polar Bears
Scientists are testing several radar systems designed to detect approaching polar bears. Erinn Hermsen / Polar Bears International
When humans and polar bears meet, the encounters can often end in tragedy—for either the bear, the human or both. Conflict doesn’t happen often, but global warming is complicating the issue. Because climate change is causing sea ice to form later in the fall and melt earlier in the spring, the bears are fasting longer. And, with nowhere else to go, they’re also spending more time on land in the Arctic, where an estimated four million humans live. Some are even seeking out easy calories from garbage dumps or piles of butchered whale remains.Scientists counted 73 reports of wild polar bears attacking humans around the world between 1870 to 2014, which resulted in 20 human deaths and 63 human injuries. (They didn’t include bear outcomes in the study.) After analyzing the encounters, researchers determined that thin or skinny adult male bears in below-average body condition posed the greatest threats to humans. Female bears, meanwhile, rarely attacked and typically only did so while defending their cubs.
To prevent human-bear encounters, scientists are developing early-warning radar detection systems they’ve nicknamed “bear-dar” to help alert northern communities when a bear is getting close. A handful of promising prototypes are in the works: Some teams of researchers are building the systems from scratch, while others are riffing off technologies that are already in use by the military. They all use artificial intelligence models that may be able to discern approaching bears. Scientists have tested the systems in Churchill, Manitoba, and are now tweaking the A.I. models to be more accurate.
“We’ve already established that the radar sees everything,” B.J. Kirschhoffer says in a statement. “Being able to see is not the problem. Filtering out the noise is the problem. … Ideally, we can train them to identify polar bears with a high degree of certainty.”
As the systems are still in testing, they do not alert members of the community or professional responders. But, eventually, communities may develop custom responses depending on the alerts, says Kirschhoffer.
“For instance, if a bear-like target is identified 200 meters out, send a text message,” he says. “If a bear-like target is identified 50 meters out, blink a red light and sound a siren.”
Synthetic aperture radar
Scientists are highly interested in polar bear dens—that is, the cozy nooks female bears dig under the snow to give birth to cubs—for several reasons. Denning, which occurs each year from December to early April, is the most vulnerable time in the life of youngsters and mothers. Though they’re accustomed to covering huge amounts of territory to find prey, mother bears hunker down for the entire denning period to protect their cubs from the Arctic elements and predators. Studying bears at den sites allows researchers to gather important behavioral and population insights, such as the body condition of mothers and cubs or how long they spend inside the den before emerging.
Scientists also want to know where dens are located because oil and gas companies can inadvertently disturb the dens—and, thus, potentially harm the bears—when they search for new sources of fossil fuels. If researchers and land managers know where polar bear dens are located, they can tell energy companies to steer clear.
But finding polar bear dens on the snowy, white, blustery tundra is a lot like finding a needle in a haystack. Historically, scientists have used low-tech methods to find dens, such as heading out on cross-country skis with a pair of binoculars or using dogs to sniff them out. But those options were often inefficient and ineffective, not to mention rough on the researchers. For the last few years, scientists have been using a technology known as forward-looking infrared imagery, or FLIR, which involves using heat-sensing cameras attached to an aircraft to detect the warm bodies of bears under the snow. But FLIR is finicky and only works in near-perfect weather—too much wind, sun or blowing snow basically renders it useless. What’s more, if the den roof is too thick, the technology can’t pick up the heat inside. Tom Smith, a plant and wildlife scientist at Brigham Young University, estimates that aerial FLIR surveys are 45 percent effective, which is far from ideal.
But a promising new technology is on the horizon: synthetic aperture radar (SAR). Affixed to an aircraft, SAR is a sophisticated remote-sensing technology that sends out electromagnetic waves, then records the bounce back, to produce a radar image of the landscape below. SAR is not constrained by the same weather-related issues as FLIR, and it can capture a huge swath of land, up to half a mile wide, at a time, according to Smith.
Scientists are still testing SAR, but, in theory, they hope to use it to create a baseline map of an area during the summer or early fall, then do another flyover during denning season. They can then compare the two images to see what’s changed.
“You can imagine, with massive computing power, it goes through and says, ‘These objects were not in this image before,’” says Smith.
Artificial intelligence
Getting an accurate headcount of polar bears over time gives scientists valuable insights into the species’ well-being amid environmental changes spurred by climate change. But polar bears roam far and wide, traveling across huge expanses of sea ice and rugged, hard-to-reach terrain in very cold environments, which makes it challenging, as well as potentially dangerous and expensive, for scientists to try to count them in the field. As a result, researchers have taken to the skies, looking for the bears while aboard aircraft or via satellites flying over their habitat. After snapping thousands of aerial photos or satellite images taken from space, they can painstakingly pore over the pictures in search of bears.
A.I. may eventually help them count the animals. Scientists are now training A.I. models to quickly and accurately recognize polar bears, as well as other species of marine mammals, in photos captured from above. For researchers who conduct aerial surveys, which produce hundreds of thousands of photos that scientists sift through, this new technology is a game-changer.
“If you’re spending eight hours a day looking through images, the amount of attention that a human brain is going to pay to those images is going to fluctuate, whereas when you have a computer do something … it’s going to do that consistently,” Erin Moreland, a research zoologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told Alaska Public Media’s Casey Grove in 2020. “People are good at this, but they’re not as good at it as a machine, and it’s not necessarily the best use of a human mind.”
To that same end, researchers are also now testing whether drones work to capture high-resolution images and gather other relevant data. Since they don’t require onboard human pilots, drones are a safer, more affordable alternative to helicopters; they’re also smaller and nimbler, and tend to be less disruptive to wildlife.
Treadmill and swim chamber
Researchers want to understand how much polar bears exert themselves while walking across the tundra or swimming through the Arctic Ocean. To get a handle on the marine mammals’ energy output on land, Anthony Pagano, a biologist with the United States Geological Survey, built a special heavy-duty polar bear treadmill. Study collaborators at the San Diego Zoo and the Oregon Zoo then trained captive polar bears to walk on it. Using shatterproof plastic and reinforced steel, the team constructed a 10-foot-long chamber that encased a treadmill typically used by horses. The 4,400-pound contraption also included a circular opening where researchers could tempt the bears into walking with fish and other tasty treats.
As a follow-up to the walking study, Pagano and biologists at the Oregon Zoo also measured the energy output of the bears while swimming. To do so, they developed a polar bear-sized swim chamber, complete with a small motor that generated waves to simulate the conditions the bears might encounter in the ocean.
Together, the two technologies helped scientists learn that bears expend more energy swimming than walking. Polar bears are good swimmers, but they’re not very efficient ones, thanks to their relatively short arms, their non-aerodynamic body shape and their propensity for swimming at the water’s surface, where drag is greatest. In a world with shrinking sea ice, polar bears likely need to swim more to find food and, thus, will burn precious calories, which could cause them to lose weight and lower their chances of reproducing—decreasing the species’ chances of survival.
Together, these and other technologies are helping researchers learn how polar bears are faring as the climate evolves. This knowledge, in turn, informs conservation decisions to help protect the bears and their environment—and the health of the planet more broadly.
“We need to understand more about how the Arctic ecosystem is changing and how polar bears are responding to loss of habitat if we are going to keep them in the wild,” says B.J. Kirschhoffer. “Ultimately, our fate is tied to the polar bear’s. Whatever actions we take to help polar bears keep their sea ice habitat intact are actions that will help humans protect our own future.”
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How Tracking Technology Is Transforming Our Understanding of Animal Behavior
January 4th, 2023Via The Conversation, a look at how tracking technology is transforming our understanding of animal behavior:
Biologging is the practice of attaching devices to animals so that scientific data can be collected. For decades, basic biologgers have been used to relay physiological data including an animal’s heart rate or body temperature. But now, new technologies are affording scientists a more advanced insight into the behaviour of animals as they move through their natural environment undisturbed.
The tracking of individual animals also provides access to remote locations that are difficult to study. In particular, science has only a limited knowledge of marine environments – the surface of the moon has been mapped and studied more extensively than our own ocean floor.
But researchers have recently fitted small video cameras to the dorsal fins of tiger sharks in the Bahamas. The footage led to the discovery of the world’s largest known seagrass ecosystem, and has extended the total known seagrass coverage by more than 40%. Seagrass ecosystems are important carbon stores, home to thousands of marine species, and can provide a buffer against coastal erosion. Conservationists are now better placed to protect these important ecosystems as a result of biologging.
Here are four more examples of humans working with animals – from dragonflies and ospreys to hedgehogs and jaguars – to improve our understanding of wildlife behaviour and numbers around the world, and how best to protect them.
1. Hedgehog protection
Rural hedgehog populations in Britain declined by up to 75% between 1981 and 2020. Conservationists require more information on their movement and behaviour to inform future efforts to protect this endangered species.Between 2016 and 2019, 52 hedgehogs were fitted with GPS trackers programmed to record the location of the hedgehog every five minutes throughout the night. The tracking data indicated that male hedgehogs travelled longer distances than females, and would often move several kilometres to find a mate. Male hedgehogs are therefore more vulnerable to road mortality. Research like this can inform strategies such as building wildlife tunnels that enable hedgehogs to bypass busy roads.
Tracking data has also revealed that rural hedgehogs travel further each night in search of food than urban hedgehogs. This highlights the importance of urban gardens as a hedgehog habitat, and supports the use of hedgehog tunnels to connect gardens.
These studies used GPS trackers that store data on the device, meaning each animal had to be recaptured to retrieve the information. This is fine for animals such as hedgehogs that do not roam far, but it can be a challenge when studying migratory animal species.
2. Osprey migration
Scientists studied birds prior to biologging by fitting them with wing tags so they could be identified individually from a distance. But information about their location relied on researchers repeatedly finding the same bird.Ospreys are migratory birds of prey that feed primarily on fish. They were persecuted into extinction in the UK in the 1800s, before being reintroduced to England in 1996. However, the absence of accurate data regarding ospreys’ movement has made it difficult to identify their wintering grounds and migratory stopover sites.
Two UK conservation charities, the RSPB and the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation, began osprey satellite tracking projects around 2007. Data on an osprey’s location, orientation, altitude and speed has provided researchers with information about their migration routes and wintering grounds.
Such information has aided measures to protect ospreys throughout their migratory range. These include education programmes to inspire young conservationists in the UK and Gambia, countries at opposite ends of an osprey’s migratory pathway.
Biologging has also unveiled peculiarities in the behaviour of ospreys. For example, one bird was found to have hitched a ride on cargo ships during its annual migration.
3. Flying insects
Biologging devices are generally large to account for a battery. So while attaching them to larger animals is relatively straightforward, studying insects has required the development of miniature devices.Insects are among the world’s smallest flying migrants – monarch butterflies and green darner dragonflies migrate south from Canada to the US each year. Researchers fitted small automated radio transmitters (weighing less than 300mg) to these insects.
Their movement over long distances was then monitored through a network of more than 1,500 automated receiver towers spread across the American continent. The towers record the biologgers within a 10km proximity.
The data revealed that the insects travelled distances of up to 143km each day at speeds of over 20 metres per second. This exceeded known daily travelling distances for the darner dragonfly. Warmer temperatures and wind assistance also allowed the insects to migrate at a faster pace.
4. Tracking from space
The Icarus project involves researchers attaching transmitters to a variety of animal species. These transmitters send data to a receiver in space which then transmits the information back to a ground station, from where it is sent to relevant researchers.This reduces the delay for data processing and device relocation, and allows the immediate availability of behavioural and physiological data on a global scale. Since March 2021, the project has tracked the movements of 15 species worldwide, including the Saiga Antelope, fruit bats and Jaguars.
The information can be used to predict the impacts of environmental change. Identifying which habitat types are selected or avoided can reveal the most productive habitats for endangered species. The behavioural response of animals to ecological changes, such as a warmer Arctic, can also be monitored.
Data from the project may allow scientists to use certain animal species to predict disaster events. For example, research has found that some animals exhibited behavioural changes immediately before Japan’s 2011 earthquake.
Icarus researchers also suggest that disease transmission hotspots could be identified using biologgers, which could help to map the spread of viruses.
Biologging has allowed for the protection of various animal species and environments by widening our knowledge of animal behaviour. But remote animal tracking may also allow humanity to be better protected from natural disasters in the future.
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