GPS data acquisition system

对野生动物的研究在很大程度上依赖于有关资源和有机体本身的空间信息。全球定位系统(GPS)的出现给生态学带来了革命性的变化，特别是景观和动物生态学。在过去的12年里，我所有的研究项目都是在野外进行的，严重依赖于高质量的GPS位置信息。所要求的四个GPS接收器将取代旧的GPS装置(Trimble GeoExplrer II)，这些装置已经变得不可靠，维护起来也很昂贵。GPS将继续在我即将进行的关于北方森林鸟类和哺乳动物栖息地选择的研究中发挥核心作用。事实上，如果没有GPS，我的大部分实地研究将变得非常繁重或不可能进行。我的研究使用每天获得的动物分布模式(点)和运动模式(线)来确定景观属性(例如，森林边缘接近、森林斑块隔离)和生态关系(例如，同种吸引、捕食)对鸟类和哺乳动物的景观利用、运动行为和繁殖性能的影响。与用于娱乐用途的低端GPS不同，要求的专业GPS设备不仅可以获取高精度的位置数据，还可以获取相关特征，如物种名称、个人ID、行为信息等。由于每天记录的位置有数百个，这种数据获取能力至关重要；我们不能使用现场笔记本来替代能够记录数据的专业GPS。

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.