IIBR Instrumentation: Coordinated innovations in radio telemetry (CIRT) for wildlife

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An award is made to Northern Arizona University to advance wildlife telemetry data collection and tag detection through coordinated innovation across multiple technological domains. Small birds and animals are important actors in ecosystems. Their populations are declining in many areas of the world, but the causes are not well-understood, motivating methods to track their locations and habitats. However, obtaining high fidelity data on the location and activity of small wildlife continues to be a challenge. Their small size precludes all but the smallest and most simple telemetry devices, or tags. Guidelines suggest that 70% of bats, birds and terrestrial species should carry tags that weigh less than 0.75 g, 4.4g, and 12.5 g, respectively—about the mass of 1 to 10 paper clips. These mass constraints continue to dictate the use of tiny Very High Frequency (VHF) radio transmitters for small-species localization. Moreover, studies of larger species often continue to rely upon VHF radio tags due to cost constraints. The transmitted radio pulses from these small VHF tags are very challenging to detect and localize. This research will improve the quality of wildlife telemetry data and advance the spatiotemporal understanding of movement and behavior. The developed technology will be open-sourced to enable adoption by the wildlife biology and ecology research communities, with dissemination through a workshop for wildlife professionals. Additionally, increasing public awareness is a core goal of this program; this will be achieved through participation in community and K-12 educational outreach programs. This research will develop an optimal tag detection algorithm and software implementation that will enable automated detection while maintaining compatibility with legacy tracking receivers. These methods will improve the range of reception and enable automated detection of telemetry devices. Tags will be reconceived to use both new wireless-system-on-chip technology and transmission methods to improve detection range and reliability, and enable in-the-field interaction with researchers. Finally, the research will develop movement guidance methods for both human trackers and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based tracking systems to reduce detection and localization time and effort. The efforts in these three research foci will be coordinated to optimize overall data collection speed and quality. The resulting algorithms and integrated systems will be lab and field tested to demonstrate outcomes with quantitative performance criteria and success metrics.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.