The project will develop a flexible instrument for conducting field studies of animals. An array of towers (at least two) permits measurement of XY locations of miniature radio transmitters, providing nearly continuous data on dozens of subjects simultaneously if necessary. In suitable habitat, accuracy of direction finding by each tower is comparable with present labor-intensive techniques widely used by observers on foot or in vehicles or aircraft. The system has no moving pans and operates with off-the-shelf or slightly modified radio transmitters of the kind commonly employed in research on wildlife.
Design goals include high data availability; modularity of software and hardware; inclusion of autocalibration, environmental data, stares reporting, and security features; and able to be configured on scales from small study plots to 500-km arrays of towers. Use of some existing equipment will permit rapid prototyping of the front end, which in turn will promote robust, user-friendly interfaces. This is important, because nearly bulletproof operation will be necessary for such an appliance to be accepted and properly employed by field biologists. Field testing of the instrument will be done in collaboration with ongoing projects run by biologist colleagues.
Availability of such an instrument will (1) reduce the cost of many studies; (2) greatly (by orders of magnitude, if desired) increase the rate and daily coverage of data gathering; (3) permit critical investigations that are logistically or technically infeasible without automated collection and real-time display of data, and (4) provide high availability and flexibility to gather telemetered information from radio transmitters, alert the investigators to significant events, and coordinate with concurrent data from other instruments. Critical investigations include research fundamental to ecology and conservation biology, investigations of endangered species or their surrogates, studies of problem species in human-dominated habitats, and investigations of disease transmittal and wildlife rehabilitation.
