GPS data acquisition system

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The study of wildlife relies heavily on spatial information about resources and the organisms themselves. The advent of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) has revolutionized Ecology, and in particular, Landscape and Animal Ecology. All my research projects in the past 12 years have been conducted in the field and have relied heavily on high-quality GPS positional information. The four GPS receivers requested will replace the old GPS units (Trimble Geoexplorer II) which have become unreliable and expensive to service.GPS will continue to play a central role in my upcoming research on habitat selection by boreal forest birds and mammals. In fact, without GPS, most of my field research would become very onerous or impossible to conduct. My research uses animal distribution patterns (points) and movement patterns (lines) obtained on a daily basis to determine the influence of landscape attributes (e.g., forest edge proximity, forest patch isolation) and ecological relationships (e.g., conspecific attraction, predation) on landscape use, movement behavior and reproductive performance by birds and mammals. The professional GPS units requested, unlike low-end GPS meant for recreational use, will allow not only the acquisition of high precision location data, but also associated features such as species name, individual ID, behavioral information, etc. With hundreds of locations recorded each day, such data acquisition capability is crucial; we cannot use field notebooks as a substitute for professional GPS capable of data logging.