With the substantial advances in the miniaturization of electronic components, wildlife biologists now routinely monitor the movements of free-ranging animals with radio-tracking devices. This book explicates the many analytical techniques and computer programs available to extract biological information from the radio tracking data. - Presentation of software programs for solving specific problems - Design of radio-tracking studies - Mechanics of data collection - Estimation of position by triangulation - Graphic presentation of animal migration, dispersal, fidelity, and association - Home range estimation, habitat utilization, and estimation of survival rates and population size
Radio Tracking and Animal Populations is a succinct synthesis of emerging technologies and their applications to the empirical and theoretical problems of population assessment. The book is divided into sections designed to encompass the various aspects of animal ecology that may be evaluated using radiotelemetry technology - experimental design, equipment and technology, animal movement, resource selection, and demographics. Wildlife biologists at the leading edge of new developments in the technology and its application have joined forces.
This book is a general guide to radio tracking and activity monitoring with pulsed-signal radio tags. The most elementary tags are used to find the animal so that it can be watched, captured or monitored in other ways. Tags can also have their pulses modulated by a variety of simple sensor sub-circuits to telemeter temperature, posture, movement, compass orientation and other aspects of animal activity. The text follows a sequence designed to guide the novice user through all aspects of radio tagging from the planning of a project and the choice of equipment, through field techniques to data analysis. There are details on tag construction and mounting both externally and by implantation. This book will be invaluable to scientists in all branches of ecology and wildlife research, both in showing ways in which radio tagging can be of use and in giving practical details on how to use this technology.
American wildlife biologists first began fitting animals with radio transmitters in the 1950s. By the 1980s the practice had proven so useful to scientists and nonscientists alike that it became global. Wired Wilderness is the first book-length study of the origin, evolution, use, and impact of these now-commonplace tracking technologies. Combining approaches from environmental history, the history of science and technology, animal studies, and the cultural and political history of the United States, Etienne Benson traces the radio tracking of wild animals across a wide range of institutions, regions, and species and in a variety of contexts. He explains how hunters, animal-rights activists, and other conservation-minded groups gradually turned tagging from a tool for control into a conduit for connection with wildlife. Drawing on extensive archival research, interviews with wildlife biologists and engineers, and in-depth case studies of specific conservation issues—such as the management of deer, grouse, and other game animals in the upper Midwest and the conservation of tigers and rhinoceroses in Nepal—Benson illuminates telemetry's context-dependent uses and meanings as well as commonalities among tagging practices. Wired Wilderness traces the evolution of the modern wildlife biologist’s field practices and shows how the intense interest of nonscientists at once constrained and benefited the field. Scholars of and researchers involved in wildlife management will find this history both fascinating and revealing.
A Handbook on Biotelemetry and Radio Tracking presents the proceedings of an International Conference on Telemetry and Radio Tracking in Biology and Medicine, held in The University of Oxford, Oxford, U.K. on March 20–22, 1979. This book illustrates the advances connected with every aspect of biotelemetry and radio tracking. Organized into five parts encompassing 101 chapters, this compilation of papers begins with an overview of the method that allows assessment or control of biological parameters from animals, subjects, and patients with comparatively little disturbance and restraint. This text then examines radio telemetry as a system for telemetry or communications over great distances. Other chapters consider better transmitter design and construction of radio tracking. This book discusses as well telemetric measurements of hemodynamic response to driving in coronary patients. The final chapter deals with the study of the coastal movements of Atlantic salmon tagged with ultrasonic transmitters. This book is a valuable resource for biological researchers and ecologists.
This book guides animal ecologists, biologists and wildlife and data managers through a step-by-step procedure to build their own advanced software platforms to manage and process wildlife tracking data. This unique, problem-solving-oriented guide focuses on how to extract the most from GPS animal tracking data, while preventing error propagation and optimizing analysis performance. Based on the open source PostgreSQL/PostGIS spatial database, the software platform will allow researchers and managers to integrate and harmonize GPS tracking data together with animal characteristics, environmental data sets, including remote sensing image time series, and other bio-logged data, such as acceleration data. Moreover, the book shows how the powerful R statistical environment can be integrated into the software platform, either connecting the database with R, or embedding the same tools in the database through the PostgreSQL extension Pl/R. The client/server architecture allows users to remotely connect a number of software applications that can be used as a database front end, including GIS software and WebGIS. Each chapter offers a real-world data management and processing problem that is discussed in its biological context; solutions are proposed and exemplified through ad hoc SQL code, progressively exploring the potential of spatial database functions applied to the respective wildlife tracking case. Finally, wildlife tracking management issues are discussed in the increasingly widespread framework of collaborative science and data sharing. GPS animal telemetry data from a real study, freely available online, are used to demonstrate the proposed examples. This book is also suitable for undergraduate and graduate students, if accompanied by the basics of databases.
This volume provides a selection of the most significant papers presented at the Fourth Conference on Fish Telemetry in Europe, in Trondheim, Norway, in 2001. Papers are focused on migratory patterns and habitat utilisation, social behaviour, physiological ecology, fisheries management, effects of human impact on fish populations, aquaculture and methodology, and new technology. This book is aimed at scientists and engineers actively involved in aquatic telemetry projects, aquatic biologists (marine and freshwater), fisheries biologists and managers.
