Advancing movement ecology research by establishing the Motus Wildlife Tracking System in Manitoba

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Humans have been fascinated by animal movement for centuries, but it is only recently that we have entered what has been described as a ‘golden age’ of movement ecology research, fueled by important advances in the miniaturization of electronic tracking devices and the development of automated receiver networks. The Motus Wildlife Tracking System (http://motus.org/) is an internationally coordinated, automated, radio-telemetry network with more than 300 receiver stations spread across the Western Hemisphere. It represents a critical technological advance in the use of radio-signals to precisely track organismal movement in time and space, providing both fine-scale local (<1m) and broad geographical (1000s of km) spatio-temporal data that can be used to study the movement and/or migration of diverse terrestrial and avian taxa. With only 3 existing receiver stations in the area of Churchill MB, southern Manitoba constitutes a critical and conspicuous gap in the current network. We are seeking support for the equipment needed to establish a 6-receiver array of the Motus system in the Winnipeg region. The purchase of equipment to establish this system and individually-coded nano-tags would support innovative research in the programs of Kevin Fraser, James Hare, and Colin Garroway in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Manitoba. In the short-term (next 5 years), we would use this equipment to test hypotheses for the development of avian migratory programs (KF), to study space-use, dispersal and source-sink dynamics of Franklin’s ground squirrels (JH), and to test the extent to which animal movement predicts gene flow in eastern grey squirrels (CG). Over the next five years, this research will be an important part of the training and theses of 12 graduate and undergraduate students and a postdoctoral researcher in the labs of the applicants. These research activities will enable the applicants and their trainees to make leading-edge contributions to the burgeoning field of movement ecology, through the lenses of their respective research programs. Once established, this system could be used by any researcher deploying coded nano-tags on their organism of interest within the detection footprint of the array. We therefore anticipate that the establishment of this system would build local capacity for related research, attracting further research activities and high quality HQP to the region well into the future. Further, because our receiver stations will be connected to the central repository-distribution system of the full Motus network, our system will collect valuable spatio-temporal data from innumerable migratory organisms outfitted with coded tags that pass within our array, thus supporting research programs from across Canada and internationally.