Publication details
Automatic radiotelemetry system: new technology in ecological field studies
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| Year of publication | 2009 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Description | Until now only large animals (greater than 300 g) could be followed in large temporal and spatial scales because of power and size constraints on the tracking devices. However, the vast majority of animals are small. Tracking small animals is important because they are often models in ecological experiments and are important bioindicators as well. Small animal tracking would allow the quantitative assessment of dispersal and migration in natural populations. Here we propose a small animal automatic radiotracking system using 1.5 g transmitters that would enable the monitoring of small birds, bats or rodents. The technique enables simultaneous tracking of several tens of individuals and could be applied in repeated studies of spatial activity and dispersal. The system is based on network of stationary stations operating on the basis of Doppler Radio Direction Finding that can automatically monitor up to 50 different frequencies, i.e. 50 independent transmitters. The stations continuously store their direction and signal power into the memory. The data are via GSM modem transmitted into a collector unit and processed to get the position of each transmitter expressed in GIS coordinates. The calculation of position is performed via triangulation from imputs of individual stations. The data are exported into ArcView compatible format and can be further analyzed with aid of Animal Movement extension via standard MCP and Kernel estimations. The field tests confirmed reliability of the instrumental equipment, variation of a directional field below 5 deg at a single station setting and an accuracy of position identifiaction exceeding those obtained by standard methods. Marking such as bat banding gives only slight insight into the migrations of these mammals. Therefore we suggest that using automatic tracking of bigger size species as the Greater mouse eared bat (Myotis myotis), the movements of which usually do not exceed 200 km, will provide new information about migration corridors on country scale in Europe. These data are needful in order to understand a natal dispersal, mechanisms critical to animal demography, metapopulation dynamics and finally to evaluate human impact on populations of bats and terrestrian small mammals. We would like to express our thanks to Jiří Mareček for his effort in the development of the antennas and receivers. The study was supported by the grant of Ministry of Education, Young and Sports of the Czech Republic No. MSM0021622416, AV0 Z20650511 |
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