Design of Deployment Strategies to Monitor the Movement of Animals with Passive Electronic Devices

• Published in: Sensors
• Main Authors: Kazimierski, Laila D., Rodríguez-García, Jorge Pablo, Eguíluz, Víctor M.
• Other Authors: Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (España), King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (España)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute 2021
• Subjects: Animal movement; Deployment strategies; Radiotelemetry technique; Central place movement model; Elephant Seals; Southern Elephant Seals
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10261/227867; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21020326; https://doi.org/10.13039/501100003339; https://doi.org/10.13039/501100004052; https://doi.org/10.13039/501100003329

© 2021 by the authors. Current animal monitoring systems have improved our knowledge of quantitative animal ecology. There are many electronic tracking technologies such as VHF/UHF telemetry, light-level geolocation, ARGOS satellite telemetry and GPS tracking. To reach the desired level of information retrieval requires the planning of adequate equipment effort and coverage, which depends on the properties of the system. We propose an equipment arrangement model consisting of a given number of receiver stations in a two-dimensional space in which the animals move according to a central place movement model. The objective is to characterize how the transmission of tracking data depends on the movement of the animals and the design of the equipment deployment: quantity and location of the receiver stations and their associated reception radius. We also implement the model using real trajectories of southern elephant seals and Australian sea lions publicly available online and tracked during the years 2010–2012. We characterize the data transmission based on different equipment configurations and we obtained analogous results to the theoretical model. This research was funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation (Spain) and FEDER through project SPASIMM [FIS2016-80067-P (AEI/FEDER, UE)], by research funding from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and the APC were funded by the Spanish National Research Council. Peer reviewed