An award is made to the University of California Davis to host a workshop with engineers and biologists from academia, industry, and government agencies. The ability to monitor free-living, wild organisms using very small, automated sensing devices will revolutionize our understanding of animal movement patterns and their physiological responses to environmental cues such as predators and weather. Monitoring animals while keeping investigators at a distance ensures minimal interference with the animals' behavior. Although many sensing-device technologies exist, insufficient collaboration between biologists and engineers currently limits development of novel solutions to many pressing biological questions. Participants in this workshop will develop a dialogue between disciplines to generate novel, transformative technologies for the monitoring of organisms in their environments. The inclusion of industry representatives will help address the often fatal gap between prototype development and production. Holding the workshop in Washington, D. C. will allow D.C-based departments, agencies, and foundations that are promoting and funding multi-disciplinary projects to attend as observers and to consider ways in which they could enable production solutions.
The workshop is designed to impact, both directly and indirectly, a broad spectrum of science, education, industry, government, and society. Development, production, and application of new technologies will give us powerful new tools for understanding global climate change, biology (with potential biomedical applications), and data capture and conveyance. Many of the technologies likely to result from closer collaborations between engineers and biologists are ideally suited for use in K-12, university, and citizen computer-based learning, allowing participants to track animals and their environments in near real-time. The needs of other governmental institutions, such as Homeland Security, NASA, and the Department of Defense, will likely overlap with those of academics and private entities and be addressed by the workshop.
This project brought together 47 people from academia, the private sector and government to discuss progress to date, and prospects for the future, in the development of small tags to deploy on small birds and other wildlife to better understand the world they live in, how it is changing, and how changes in their environment affect the internal environment of the birds themselves. Workshop participants, mostly from the US, but with key participants from Europe and Canada, represented organizations spanning the gamut from government research institutes to small industry and from NGOs to congress. They explored the state of the art and future prospects in four major areas: miniature, low-power sensors; radio-frequency tags; receiver systems to follow those tags; and big data infrastructure and theory to archive and analyze the large volumes of data that are increasingly being produced. The capabilities of systems for environmental and organismal sensing are exploding with developments in all of these areas, and the workshop team is working on a collaborative publication that will summarize and synthesize the current state of each of these areas and prospects for developments in the near future. In addition, workshop participants forged new collaborations and gained distinctive new perspectives on their own work and that of the others.
