Collaborative Research: IDBR: WildSense: Instrumenting Wildlife to Gather Contact Rate Information Using Delay Tolerant Wireless Sensor Networks

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A grant has been awarded to Drs. Shivakant Mishra and Richard Han at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Drs. Tom Hobbs and Michael Miller at the Colorado State University and Colorado Division of Wildlife, Fort Collins. The title of the project is ?Collaborative Research: IDBR: WildSense: Instrumenting Wildlife to Gather Contact Rate Information Using Delay Tolerant Wireless Sensor Networks?. The main goal of this project is to design, implement, and deploy WildSense, a novel system for remotely tracking free-ranging animals in natural environments based on the emerging technology of mobile, delay-tolerant, wireless sensor networks. WildSense is expected to provide transformative improvements, both qualitatively and quantitatively, over the state-of-the-art telemetry systems currently being used to study wildlife. Qualitative improvements offered by WildSense include an ability to collect location information as well as timing, location, and duration of contacts among free-ranging animals; quantitative improvements include a tenfold enhancement in the accuracy of collected data, a tenfold reduction in instrument and labor costs, and a much easier way of managing the entire system. This project is comprised of three activities: (1) Developing a hardware prototype that can be easily carried by a wide range of wild vertebrates; (2) Building the embedded software, networking and application code to accommodate the resource constraints posed by limited memory, radio bandwidth, CPU processing speed, and energy lifetime available on current wireless sensor devices; and (3) Testing and deploying WildSense in a fully controlled lab environment, a paddock using tame, captive mule deer as test subjects, and in a field environment using free-ranging mule deer. WildSense is expected to transform studies of animal ecology to benefit a broad community of users. These benefits include the potential for increasing sample sizes of instrumented animals tenfold by reducing per unit costs, for fundamentally improving communicating data from animals to researchers, and for affording unique opportunities to observe contact patterns among animals. The project also addresses basic challenges in designing and implementing mobile, delay tolerant sensor networks that provide accurate data for end-users. These challenges are posed by difficult environmental conditions including the natural elements, wildlife locomotion, and lossy wireless communication, as well as resource constraints including limited energy lifetime, memory, bandwidth, and processing capability. The WildSense system presents many opportunities for exploring the tradeoffs between reliability, accuracy, timeliness, and longevity. This project will train undergraduate and graduate students to do interdisciplinary work in computer science & engineering, ecology and wildlife management. In addition, the project will involve students from underrepresented groups in all aspects of development and field evaluation.