topic: GPS tracking

topic: GPS tracking

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Mini radio tags help track ‘murder hornets’ and other invasive insects
- Our increasingly interconnected world is moving insect pests around the planet, introducing invasive species that threaten agriculture and local ecologies.
- But tech is fighting back: Researchers have developed radio-tracking tags small enough to attach to invasive yellow-legged hornets in the U.K. and Europe, allowing scientists to find and destroy their nests.
- Researchers are now deploying this technology in the U.S., to address yellow-legged hornets in Georgia and northern giant hornets in the Pacific Northwest.

New trackers bring prairie dogs’ little-known underground life to light
- Researchers have deployed a new tracker that helps them monitor prairie dogs and track their movements underground.
- The tracker uses sensors, including accelerometers and magnetometers, and combines them with GPS technology to enable researchers to retrace the trajectories of the animals.
- Prairie dogs dig up complex burrow systems and spend most of their time underground, making their movements elusive.
- During initial trials, researchers were able to use the trackers to reconstruct the trajectories of prairie dogs while they were underground.

Conservationists look to defy gloomy outlook for Borneo’s sun bears
- Sun bears are keystone species, helping sustain healthy tropical forests. Yet they’re facing relentless challenges to their survival from deforestation, habitat degradation, poaching and indiscriminate snaring; fewer than 10,000 are thought to remain across the species’ entire global range.
- A bear rehabilitation program in Malaysian Borneo cares for 44 sun bears rescued from captivity and the pet trade and has been releasing bears back into the wild since 2015. But with threats in the wild continuing unabated, success has been mixed.
- A recent study indicates that as few as half of the released bears are still alive, demonstrating that rehabilitation alone will never be enough to tackle the enormous threats and conservation issues facing the bears in the wild.
- Preventing bears from being poached from the wild in the first place should be the top priority, experts say, calling for a holistic approach centered on livelihood support for local communities through ecotourism to encourage lifestyles that don’t involve setting snares that can kill bears.

Wildlife management platform EarthRanger goes mobile with new app
- Since it was launched in 2017, the EarthRanger software has helped protected-area managers, law enforcement agencies and wildlife conservationists to collect, visualize and track data from the field on a single platform.
- In a bid to be nimbler, the software has now gone mobile with an app that builds on the functions of the web-based platform; it also helps rangers use their phones as tracking devices.
- The app has already been used to track elephants as well as rangers in Kenya’s Maasai Mara, as well as to plan the response to an oil spill off the coast of the Philippines.

Roads, human activity take a toll on red pandas: Q&A with researcher Damber Bista
- Damber Bista is a Nepali conservation scientist studying the country’s population of red pandas, an endangered species.
- He says there needs to be much more work done to protect the species, given that 70% of their habitat falls outside of protected areas.
- In an interview with Mongabay, Bista talks about the added stress that habitat fragmentation is putting on juvenile red pandas, the need for landscape-level conservation measures, and the importance of long-term studies.

Fishy business of squid vessels needs stronger regulation, study says
- Experts are drawing attention to the unregulated nature of squid fishing, which they say could lead to the overexploitation of species, allow illegal fishing activity to flourish, and contribute to inequity.
- New research suggests that squid fishing increased by 68% across the global oceans between 2017 and 2020, and that 86% took place in unregulated parts of the ocean.
- China’s distant-water fishing fleet accounts for 92% of this tracked squid fishing activity.
- Experts say that unregulated squid fishing needs to be addressed with better management, monitoring and transparency.

For tigers in Nepal, highways are a giant roadblock best avoided
- A new study indicates that the presence of roads, and vehicle traffic, in tiger habitats could take a toll on the big cats’ behavior and long-term fitness and survival.
- A tiger fitted with a GPS collar in Nepal’s Parsa National Park was found to avoid crossing roads by day, but to cross more often during the country’s 2021 COVID-19 lockdown.
- This suggests the animals can adapt quickly when traffic volume eases, pointing to measures that can be taken to mitigate road impacts not just on tigers, but on wildlife in general.
- Researchers say the findings should give planners in Nepal something to consider as they look to double the number of lanes on the East-West Highway that runs through both Parsa and Bardiya national parks.

‘Studying a ghost’: In Cape Town, urban caracals give researchers lots to ponder
- Researchers have spent years trapping and tracking the elusive caracal on the edges of the South African city of Cape Town to better understand the needs of these wild cats.
- Urban caracals have adapted their behavior in a number of ways to survive on the margins of the city, including hunting more during the day.
- Although highly adaptable, urban caracals face many challenges, including ingesting rat poison.
- Researchers recommend more greenways to allow the animals to survive in these heavily modified environments.

Tech revolution holds world of promise for conservation, but challenges persist
- Technology has rapidly changed the face of conservation and is now at a critical juncture where cutting edge tools are available, but aren’t necessarily as accessible or affordable as they need to be.
- A recent survey by WILDLABS, an online platform connecting conservation technology experts, shows that environmental DNA, networked sensors and artificial intelligence tools are the fields that hold the most promise.
- Yet despite the progress that’s been made, there are still many barriers to accessibility for local and Indigenous communities.
- Experts say collaboration and partnerships between conservationists, tech developers and local and Indigenous communities will be key to ensuring that conservation tech can continue having an impact.

Tracking white-bellied pangolins in Nigeria, the new global trafficking hub
- Nigeria has in recent years become a major transit point for the illegal trade in pangolins, the scaly anteater known for being the most trafficked mammal in the world.
- With the four Asian pangolin species increasingly scarce, traffickers have made Nigeria their hub for collecting scales and meat from the four African species and shipping them to East Asia.
- In Cross River National Park, home to the elusive white-bellied pangolin, researcher Charles Emogor is working to both study the species and work with communities to end the poaching.
- “Until our government faces up to the fact that we’ve become a staging ground for the pangolin trade, I fear we’re only going to see more cross-border smuggling of scales, and more pangolin flesh for sale in wild meat markets,” he says.

For Atlantic sea turtles, Sargasso Sea is home during the ‘lost years’
- In a new study, researchers tracked the movements of young green turtles and found that they navigated toward the Sargasso Sea, rather than drifting passively along the currents in the North Atlantic Ocean.
- While there have been theories and anecdotal evidence that turtle hatchlings travel to the Sargasso Sea and spend their “lost years” in the region, this is the first study that uses satellite tracking to confirm that green turtles are indeed going there.
- A previous study by the same group of researchers also tracked the movements of loggerhead turtles into the Sargasso Sea, although their journeys were found to be more nuanced.
- Experts say the study draws attention to the importance of protecting the Sargasso Sea and tackling issues such as plastic pollution.

Whale zone ahead: A cetacean speed trap tags ships going over the limit
- North Atlantic right whales, a critically endangered species with fewer than 366 remaining individuals, face two main threats: fishing gear entanglements and ship strikes.
- Many ships do not obey voluntary or mandatory speed restrictions in areas where North Atlantic right whales are present, raising the risk of fatal collisions.
- A new tool called Ship Speed Watch provides information on vessels that are not obeying speed restrictions.
- Conservationists say they hope it will help build awareness and strengthen regulations surrounding ship speeds.

The turtle egg that pinged back: Tracing a poaching pathway in Costa Rica
- A team of scientists has created 3D printed decoy sea turtle eggs, fitted with GPS trackers to follow the path of eggs stolen by poachers.
- In a recent study on the first trial run of these eggs, the team confirmed that most poached sea turtle eggs are traded locally.
- However, they also identified a much longer track — 137 kilometers, or 85 miles — that illuminated the pathway of what appears to be a much more organized trade system.
- Mongabay followed the hour-by-hour track of this egg to understand why sea turtle poaching still happens, and to learn what experts think can be done to stop it.

New evidence suggests China’s ‘dark’ vessels poached in Galápagos waters
- A fleet of Chinese-owned fishing vessels crowded along the edge of Ecuador’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) near the Galápagos Islands between June and September, prompting international concern that they would illegally fish in Ecuador’s territorial waters.
- Several vessels turned off their GPS-based automatic identification systems (AIS), possibly to avoid discovery while partaking in illegal activities, several sources found.
- An analysis of new data, this time from radio signals, not GPS, detected unidentified ships within the Galápagos EEZ, with several of the boats operating immediately adjacent to the Chinese fleet.
- The new data provide additional, but still inconclusive, evidence that the Chinese fleet may have entered Ecuador’s EEZ.

Sea turtles often lose their way, but always reach their destination
- A new study found that green sea turtles rely on a “crude map” to navigate the ocean, often going several hundred kilometers off course before successfully arriving at their destination.
- Using GPS tracking devices, the research team tracked the migrations of female green turtles from nesting grounds on Diego Garcia Island in the Indian Ocean to foraging grounds on isolated oceanic islands.
- Green turtles demonstrate a particularly high fidelity to foraging grounds, which made them an ideal species to study.
- The researchers say they hope their findings will help inform conservation efforts to protect green turtles, which are an endangered species.

For tiger moms, the work-life balance struggle is real, study finds
- For the first time ever, scientists were able to document the behavior of a GPS-collared Amur tiger in the wild for the four months before and four months after the birth of her cubs.
- The study, published in the journal Mammal Research, reveals that the new tiger mom made time for her cubs by abandoning defense of her territory, traveling more rapidly from kills, making fewer but larger kills, and resting less.
- The Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica), sometimes referred to as the Siberian tiger, is currently listed as an endangered species on the IUCN Red List.
- Poaching is now the biggest threat to the wild Amur tigers, as tiger parts continue to be in high demand throughout Asia for use as ornaments, in traditional medicine, and as a status symbol.

Protected areas best conserve mammalian diversity when connected with corridors, biologged weasels show
- For protected area (PA) networks to be an effective conservation tool, they should be well-connected to allow species movement through unprotected landscapes, but questions remain on what configuration of natural features can best facilitate animal movement.
- A recent study compared three theories of animal movement (structurally intact corridors, least-cost paths, and stepping stones) by analyzing the fine-scale movements of GPS-tagged fishers, a member of the weasel family. They found the tagged fishers consistently moved along structurally intact, natural corridors across a PA network.
- With the Aichi 2020 Biodiversity Targets in mind, the authors highlight that simply increasing the number of protected areas alone may not achieve the objectives of the protected area network amidst an increasingly fragmented landscape; the conservation of natural corridors between PAs may be equally important, something for future planners to consider.

On Peru’s border, the Tikuna tribe takes on illegal coca growers
- Members of the Tikuna indigenous people in Peru’s border region with Colombia and Brazil have chosen to guard their forests against the rapid expansion of illegal coca crops, the plant from which cocaine is derived.
- Equipped with GPS-enabled cellphones and satellite maps, they confront loggers and drug traffickers who have threatened them with death.
- The community wants the government to do more to help them, including assisting in their transition to growing food crops from which they can make a legitimate living.

‘Landscape of fearlessness’: bushbuck emboldened following top-predator decline in Mozambique
- Bushbuck in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park have become increasingly fearless in their foraging habits, changing from foraging exclusively in woodland areas to braving open floodplains.
- Following years of civil war, populations of large herbivores and carnivores in Gorongosa declined by over 90 percent, with some top predators completely extirpated.
- Researchers from Princeton University conducted experiments using state-of-the-art equipment to establish whether the bushbucks’ use of floodplains for foraging was due to the decline in predation threat.
- Following experimentally simulated predation events, bushbuck significantly increased their use of tree cover, indicating that the reintroduction of top predators would restore a ‘landscape of fear’.

Satellite trackers help fight vultures’ extinction in southern Africa
- Vultures in southern Africa are being killed, mainly by eating carcasses poisoned by farmers, and in collisions with power lines and wind turbines.
- Concerned about population declines, the Maloti-Drakensberg Vulture Project began tracking vulture movements with small GPS transmitters, only to find them dying at a rapid rate.
- The three-dimensional tracking data showing the overlap between vulture breeding and roosting areas resulted in cancellation of a pair of proposed wind farms in Lesotho and a call for more ecologically informed siting of needed renewable energy infrastructure.

For the birds: Innovations enable tracking of even small flying animals
- Advances in satellite communications have revolutionized wildlife telemetry, yet tracking the movements of small animals, especially ones that fly, and marine species, which rarely break the ocean’s surface, has remained a challenge.
- In a November 20th virtual meetup on next-generation wildlife tracking, three speakers introduced developments that have broadened telemetry’s reach to new species and new types of data being collected.
- Recent innovations — including the ICARUS tracking system, hybridization of communications platforms, and miniaturization of sensors — are producing tiny solar-powered tracking tags and tags carrying various environmental sensors that function within private networks flexible enough to use the most efficient of several communications technologies available at a given site.

In pursuit of the rare bird that vanishes for half the year
- Until recently, the habits and habitats of the Bengal florican remained a mystery: males were easily seen in their seasonally flooded grassland habitat during the breeding season but effectively disappeared for half the year.
- Researchers in India and Nepal combined field surveys, satellite telemetry and remote sensing to model the distribution and assess the critically endangered bird’s movements, survival and home ranges.
- After years of not knowing the birds’ non-breeding whereabouts, the study found that Bengal floricans leave their protected, seasonally flooded breeding areas in favor of unprotected low-intensity agricultural fields and other upland grasslands during their non-breeding season.

Filling in the gaps: Managing endangered species on the high seas
- Information about how marine animals move through the oceans has become vitally important as efforts progress to create a global plan for securing sustainable fish stocks in the high seas. Researchers are integrating new technologies and applying new approaches to data sets to find answers.
- A recent examination of the long-term Tagging of Pelagic Predators (TOPP) data set has mapped the travel patterns of marine predators — certain whale, turtle, tuna, shark, and seabird species — through their life cycles.
- The study showed that many of these predators spend over half their time on the high seas, supporting the need for global strategies to protect and monitor the high seas. Vessel identification systems paired with several emerging satellite technologies can help.

Stay or go? Understanding a partial seasonal elephant migration
- Elephants in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park wearing GPS tracking tags shared a general dry-season home range but followed three different wet-season migration strategies: residency, short-distance migration, and long-distance migration.
- Despite similar dry-season conditions that kept all the tagged elephants near provisioned waterholes, the migrating elephants began their seasonal movements at the onset of the first rains.
- Scientists urge collaboration among stakeholders and countries to maintain the long-distance, cross-border migrations some animals need to survive.

Tracking elephant movements reveals transboundary wildlife corridors
- Data from satellite tracking tags on 120 elephants in southern Africa have identified a suite of wildlife movement corridors across five southern African countries, suggesting the importance of cross-border coordination.
- Wide-ranging movements of elephants include dispersal from northern Botswana north into Angola and south toward the Kalahari Desert.
- Research findings have suggested that open and unimpeded movement corridors can help reduce conflict with human residents while blocked corridors can push elephants and other wildlife into new developments or villages, resulting in increased conflict.

An anti-poaching technology for elephants that is always listening
- Summer 2018 marked the successful completion of the first of three test phases for a new anti-poaching technology elephants can wear on a tracking collar.
- Called WIPER by its development team, the device integrates with wildlife tracking collars and listens for the shockwave, or sonic boom, of a high-powered rifle, a common weapon in the industrial killing of elephants and other megafauna.
- WIPER’s design overcomes two key challenges for high-tech wildlife monitoring: power source (by creating a sleep mode) and cost (by putting designs in the public domain).
- WIPER provides real-time alerts and location data when a rifle is fired within 50 meters (50 yards) of the collared animal. WIPER may not protect the animal wearing it, but it helps security personnel close in on poachers, which may deter future poaching.

Videos: spectacled bear’s home in the dry forests of Peru revealed
- Laura, an Andean spectacled bear (Tremarctos ornatus), is the first bear to wear a GPS collar in Peru’s Batán Grande Archaeological Complex, an ecosystem offers greater visibility than cloud forests, where the bears typically live.
- Laura and about 50 other bears have been monitored for ten years by the Spectacled Bear Conservation Peru (SBC) after they were discovered in the unique Peruvian dry forest ecosystem.
- Over an area of 15,000 hectares (over 37,000 acres), the SBC program uses camera traps, GPS collars and direct field observation to study the bears.

In pursuit of traceability, palm oil giant tests GPS-based solution
- Golden Agri-Resources (GAR), one of the world’s biggest palm oil companies, is testing new GPS-based technology to establish traceability for the palm oil it sources from third-party mills in Indonesia.
- GAR says it has already achieved traceability, down to the plantation level, for the palm fruit processed by the 44 mills that it owns. But these mills account for just 39 percent of the palm oil that GAR sells.
- The company has long acknowledged the difficulty in extending that traceability standard to the more than 400 third-party mills from which it buys the bulk of its palm oil. This is in large part because of the unregulated nature of the middlemen who buy the palm fruit from farmers and sell it to the mills.

Borneo’s elephants prefer degraded forests, a new study finds
- New research has found that Bornean elephants most often use degraded forests with canopy heights topping out at around 13 meters (43 feet).
- Less than 25 percent of the state’s protected intact forests, which include primary forests, are suitable for elephants, the authors concluded.
- The team suggests that maintaining suitable elephant habitat in Malaysian Borneo will require the protection of relatively small patches of degraded forests that elephants favor.

Where one predator meets another: tracking sharks and fishing effort
- Fishing boats kill over 100 million sharks each year, many of which are caught unintentionally (bycatch) and may be discarded at sea without being recorded, so data on their mortality are poor.
- Researchers used satellite telemetry and publicly available global fishing locations in Global Fishing Watch to compare movements of 10 blue sharks to fishing activity in the northwest Atlantic Ocean.
- Within a 110-day period, two of the 10 tagged sharks surfaced near three different boats that were likely fishing, based on their movement patterns.
- The research team wants to better understand how fishing fleets can limit fishing in areas when and where sharks and other non-target species gather or migrate each year.

Location, location, location goes high-tech: Facts and FAQs about satellite-based wildlife tracking
- Satellite-based tracking tags, including ARGOS and GPS systems, collect and communicate animal locations and in some cases, acceleration and physiological data—straight to your computer, 24/7.
- ARGOS satellites use their relative position and the Doppler shift to estimate a tag’s location, which they relay back to Earth. GPS tags receive position information from multiple satellites and either store it or resend it via another communications network.
- Satellite-based tags weigh more, cost more, and demand more power than VHF radio tags. Nevertheless, they provide automated collection of thousands of point locations of an animal, which helps researchers to more precisely define home ranges, migration routes, and the relationships of these patterns to landscape features.

Field Notes: Finding Jacobo; an Andean cat captivates conservationists
- The Andean cat ranges from remote areas of central Peru to the Patagonian steppe. Perfectly adapted to extreme environments, this small feline is threatened by habitat degradation and hunting, but most of all it suffers from anonymity: it’s hard to save an animal that no one ever sees.
- So few of these endangered cats are scattered across such vast landscapes that even most of their advocates have never seen the species they’re trying to protect. But the conservation efforts that could save this cat could also preserve the wild places where Andean cats live.
- When a male Andean cat was found wandering around a soccer field, Andean Cat Alliance members agreed to forego the extraordinary opportunity to study the animal in captivity, and try instead to return “Jacobo” to the wild.
- Andean Cat Alliance coordinators Rocío Palacios and Lilian Villalba orchestrated the multinational volunteer release effort. Conservationists equipped Jacobo with a GPS collar and hope that tracking his travels will reveal new data about this secretive cat, considered a symbol of the Andes.

CyberTracking for Africa’s most endangered ape
- Protected area staff use the handheld tool CyberTracker to collect data and produce spatial and statistical analyses to guard gorillas in Cross River reserves.
- The system aids the conservation of the critically endangered Cross River gorilla, improving law enforcement by facilitating the monitoring of wildlife, human interferences and patrols.
- CyberTracker use is expanding to other reserves in West Africa and around the globe, both on its own and, in places like the Cross River landscape, in combination with SMART analysis software.

Getting SMART about Wildlife Crime
- SMART technology has helped wildlife rangers and managers in various countries improve their efficiency by tracking and analyzing signs of noteworthy or illegal activities observed during patrols.
- Using this data, SMART lets managers assess current threats, locate crime hotspots, focus limited resources and adapt enforcement approaches, making frontline conservation more effective.
- It empowers rangers, managers and law enforcement to improve governance and help conserve threatened species such as saolas, okapis, elephants, dolphins and tigers.

Wildlife biology in the 21st century
- Mark Hebblewhite studies the intersection of predator-prey dynamics and human impacts.
- Merging animal tracking data with remote-sensing information from satellites is “perhaps the most productive tool to answer large-scale questions about human impact on the planet.”
- Collecting and synthesizing information from many tracking studies allows researchers to quickly draw robust conclusions about large-scale ecological processes and human impacts.

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