An integrated system uses road congestion information to guide routing. GPS tracks vehicles, and the GSM short message service maintains communications with a central planning service.

Understanding the role of urine marking in the\ud territorial systems of wild mammals can be difficult, especiallymfor nocturnal cryptic species. Even for common species, such as the red fox Vulpes vulpes, a comprehensive\ud analysis of seasonal and sex differences has not been carried out. Using 6 years of infra-red video monitoring, we compared marking rates between months and between sexes.\ud Urine marking was significantly lower during summer\ud (June–August). Males urine marked significantly more frequently than females during late summer and autumn, but not winter. Males marked more frequently than females also\ud during March. There was no increase during the breeding\ud season for either sex. Our results correlate with previous\ud partial data but demonstrate how urine marking rates vary\ud across the year. They also further support the greater role of males in fox territorial maintenance. Urine marking is lowest during summer when territorial intrusions are least, whilst the higher male urine marking rate in March reflects the,period when females are denning. Overall, our results provide the first comprehensive analysis of red fox urine\ud marking rates, contributing to a greater understanding of\ud territoriality and olfactory communication

Fiducial tags can be recognised successfully and decoded by computer vision systems in order to produce location information. We term a system dependable if its observable results are predictable and repeatable. The dependability of such a vision system is fundamentally dependent on the scheme used to encode data on the tag. We show that the rotational symmetry common to many tag designs requires particular consideration in order to understand the performance of the coding schemes when errors occur. We develop an abstract representation of tags carrying symbolic data which allows existing information coding techniques to achieve robust codes. An error-correcting coding scheme is presented for carrying arbitrary symbolic data in a dependable vision system.

Food provided by householders represents a key resource for urban red foxes Vulpes vulpes.Using long-term video footage, we examined how patterns of feeding site attendance varied with season, sex and likely residence status. For foxes attending frequently (>15%) we found feeding site attendance highest for females in spring, probably because of feeding dependent young, and lowest for both sexes in autumn because of changes in seasonal food abundance or in time spent in other activities. For infrequent attenders (<15%), females attended most often in autumn and winter, coinciding with the dispersal period. Male attendance was not higher during the breeding season. Our combined results show how feeding site attendance changes throughout the year relative to potential intrinsic and extrinsic factors.

Scent marking is widely recognised to have a crucial function in many species. Most research has focussed on adults and very little is known about scent marking patterns during juvenile development. Using video records of juvenile red fox Vulpes vulpes across 6 years, we tested whether scent marking rates varied with age or sex, or whether juveniles remaining on the natal territory (philopatry) marked more frequently than those that disappeared. Our data show that male juvenile red foxes scent marked more than females during early development, but rates rapidly declined as they aged. In contrast, females showed a significantly later and slower rate of decline. Within females, individuals that remained in the natal area had higher scent marking rates than those that disappeared, suggesting that scent marking has a role in social group affiliation within litters. These results demonstrate that scent marking plays an important role in juveniles, including their intra-litter social interactions.