Technology wish lists and the significance of temperature-sensing wildlife telemetry

Abstract

Telemetry has revolutionized studies in wildlife biology, ecology, physiology, and conservation. With the increased demand for telemetry, new technology has made great strides to enable long studies in harsh and remote areas on a wide variety of study species. As the climate crisis continues to impact animals, temperature-sensing telemetry has become a helpful technique for understanding the effects of climate change and how to protect wildlife from them. However, temperature-sensing telemetry and telemetry in general still pose technological challenges and accessibility issues for the researchers who use it. Currently available telemetry technology is expensive, too large and heavy for many study species, and cannot measure all variables researchers want to study. These technological improvements have especially been neglected for temperature-sensing telemetry, which may be underutilized given the current climate crisis. To understand why innovation has stalled, and where it should be directed going forward, we gathered opinions from researchers who use telemetry and from manufacturers that create and supply telemetry equipment. Our goal was to broadly describe the current technological landscape, compare it to what we envision for the future, and make suggestions for how to reach that future.

Beetles on the move: Not‐just‐a‐technical review of beetles' radio‐tracking

“…The ongoing miniaturization of tags will open new opportunities to track smaller species. However, the costs of the equipment are currently one of the major obstacles to a wider application of this method in the field of insect ecology (Weaver et al, 2021).…”

“…Radio telemetry is not the cheapest method for tracking, due to the cost of the equipment. This issue rules out researchers with small budgets, including those from low‐income countries (Hebblewhite & Haydon, 2010; Weaver et al, 2021). In some cases, researchers can compromise by using a few tracking devices with a risk of reduced data quantity and subsequent problems with publishing.…”

Measurements of American lobster heart rate and movements in the wild using a low-cost open source datalogger

“…Using plastic dive housings designed for GoPro cameras, rather than metal enclosures, has reduced the weight of the overall package to 80% of the design used for the eld studies reported here, and we now use molded Similarly, the design and code are easily modi ed to accept other inputs, from either analog sensors or those using digital communications protocols. The low-cost, "do it yourself" approach to logger construction used here will hopefully provide a platform for further innovation and a broader availability of biologging techniques for future studies (Weaver et al 2021). For example, we recently built and successfully tested a sensor which can be added to a C-HAT that allows us to log the feeding activity of lobsters (Guzler, unpublished data).…”

“…While there are currently a number of commercially available biologgers, the costs of these tags may be prohibitive for some researchers and the sensor ts may not be appropriate for all study subjects and questions (Weaver et al 2021). The recent proliferation of small, programmable microcontrollers and a burgeoning open-source hardware and computing movement has made the creation and programming of custom electronics increasingly feasible (Wolcott 1995; Fahlbusch and Harrington 2019; Whitford and Klimley 2019).…”

Modular E-Collar for Animal Telemetry: An Animal-Centered Design Proposal

“…The application of telemetry in animals presents difficulties, mainly related to (i) weight distribution; (ii) autonomy; (iii) flexibility in design; and (iv) cost of the devices. These problems have become apparent from the analysis of three types of sources: scientific publications referring to the physical design of animal telemetry devices [ 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 ]; scientific publications referring to the evaluation of animal telemetry [ 13 , 25 , 26 , 27 ] as well as commercial solutions currently available [ 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 ].…”