We are building a 21st century wildlife monitoring system to inform resource management of the impacts of drought, wildfire, land use, climate change, and other landscape level stressors. The Automated Interactive Monitoring System (AIMS) for Wildlife will provide an actionable data stream by combining enormous quantities of wildlife movement data with environmental data and delivering it to stakeholders in a timely, organized, and easily interpretable manner.
AIMS for Wildlife will have a vast potential of applications. It will provide information on timing, distribution, and movements of animals to stakeholders to meet everyday decision-making needs, provide effectiveness monitoring, and help prioritize multi-beneficial use of limited resources. AIMS for Wildlife is being designed to inform adaptive management across multiple scales from local to global.
Goals:
Background:
The Western Ecological Research Center‘s Dixon Field Station has been developing and applying innovative technology to track wildlife for over 30 years. Their science leadership and collaborations with state, federal, university, and NGO partners has informed local, state, national, and international wildlife management.
In the 1980s, waterfowl were tracked with VHF telemetry and triangulation primarily from vehicles and expensive aerial searches. This process was time-consuming that required many hours of driving to get a single location with an accuracy of +/- 100 meters. In the 1990-2010s, waterfowl continued to be tracked using VHF telemetry, but new technologies emerged including transmitters (Platform Terminal Transmitters – PTT’s) that sent locations via satellite. The accuracy of these locations was often less accurate than VHF but allowed animals to be tracked across a broader landscape, but the frequency of relocation was limited due to battery power. Starting circa 2015 and broadly adopted in the 2020s, waterfowl were tracked using solar powered GPS-GSM transmitter with accuracies <5 meters. This newer technology allows locations to be collected up to every minute and shared in near real-time. The exponential leap in data quality and quantity has resulted in new opportunities to understand wildlife. Life histories of birds have become illuminated by the ability to track individuals with precision, as well as in remote places that were previously logistically impossible to access. Combining the newest wildlife movement technology with available environmental data is a promising new approach to informing land and resource managers.
AIMS for Wildlife in Action:
We are building a 21st century wildlife monitoring system to inform resource management of the impacts of drought, wildfire, land use, climate change, and other landscape level stressors. The Automated Interactive Monitoring System (AIMS) for Wildlife will provide an actionable data stream by combining enormous quantities of wildlife movement data with environmental data and delivering it to stakeholders in a timely, organized, and easily interpretable manner.
AIMS for Wildlife will have a vast potential of applications. It will provide information on timing, distribution, and movements of animals to stakeholders to meet everyday decision-making needs, provide effectiveness monitoring, and help prioritize multi-beneficial use of limited resources. AIMS for Wildlife is being designed to inform adaptive management across multiple scales from local to global.
Goals:
Background:
The Western Ecological Research Center‘s Dixon Field Station has been developing and applying innovative technology to track wildlife for over 30 years. Their science leadership and collaborations with state, federal, university, and NGO partners has informed local, state, national, and international wildlife management.
In the 1980s, waterfowl were tracked with VHF telemetry and triangulation primarily from vehicles and expensive aerial searches. This process was time-consuming that required many hours of driving to get a single location with an accuracy of +/- 100 meters. In the 1990-2010s, waterfowl continued to be tracked using VHF telemetry, but new technologies emerged including transmitters (Platform Terminal Transmitters – PTT’s) that sent locations via satellite. The accuracy of these locations was often less accurate than VHF but allowed animals to be tracked across a broader landscape, but the frequency of relocation was limited due to battery power. Starting circa 2015 and broadly adopted in the 2020s, waterfowl were tracked using solar powered GPS-GSM transmitter with accuracies <5 meters. This newer technology allows locations to be collected up to every minute and shared in near real-time. The exponential leap in data quality and quantity has resulted in new opportunities to understand wildlife. Life histories of birds have become illuminated by the ability to track individuals with precision, as well as in remote places that were previously logistically impossible to access. Combining the newest wildlife movement technology with available environmental data is a promising new approach to informing land and resource managers.
AIMS for Wildlife in Action: