35 research outputs found
Monitoring Movement Patterns in Choughs
During soft-release reintroductions, biotelemetry devices are often used to track the movement patterns of released individuals. Very high frequency (VHF) and Global Positioning System (GPS) are commonly used telemetry methods, providing accurate locations. An alternative is dead-reckoning, providing high-resolution movement paths from heading and speed measurements, showing fine-scale changes that VHF may not identify. Errors in speed estimation can accumulate, however, producing wide error margins in flight distances and locations. I assess the utility of both techniques in relation to the release of red-billed choughs (Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax) on Jersey, UK. First, I use VHF locations to examine dispersal and habitat selection. I then go on to consider the potential of dead-reckoning for future monitoring, by examining the main determinants of error in flight distance and bearing in a similar-sized bird. The reintroduced choughs undertook small movements close to the release site, with individuals travelling as a flock, and dispersal distance showing no clear increase through time. Coastal grassland was the most used habitat, despite low availability, raising the possibility that dispersal may be limited by a lack of suitable habitat. The chough’s relatively short flight distances and tendency to return to a verifiable location, mean that dead-reckoning could potentially work well as a method to reconstruct their movement paths. However, drift was influenced by flight height, tailwind support and tortuosity. The effect of even low wind speeds on drift shown here suggests this would likely have an even greater influence in locations with higher wind speeds, such as Jersey. Ultimately, the use of multiple low-power telemetry systems could prove powerful, with corrected dead-reckoning providing new insight on the movement frequency, distances and paths as well as habitat selection, that could better inform conservation policy
Exploring Animal Behavior Through Sound: Volume 1
This open-access book empowers its readers to explore the acoustic world of animals. By listening to the sounds of nature, we can study animal behavior, distribution, and demographics; their habitat characteristics and needs; and the effects of noise. Sound recording is an efficient and affordable tool, independent of daylight and weather; and recorders may be left in place for many months at a time, continuously collecting data on animals and their environment. This book builds the skills and knowledge necessary to collect and interpret acoustic data from terrestrial and marine environments. Beginning with a history of sound recording, the chapters provide an overview of off-the-shelf recording equipment and analysis tools (including automated signal detectors and statistical methods); audiometric methods; acoustic terminology, quantities, and units; sound propagation in air and under water; soundscapes of terrestrial and marine habitats; animal acoustic and vibrational communication; echolocation; and the effects of noise. This book will be useful to students and researchers of animal ecology who wish to add acoustics to their toolbox, as well as to environmental managers in industry and government
Ocean Noise
Scientific and societal concern about the effects of underwater sound on marine ecosystems is growing. While iconic megafauna was of initial concern, more and more taxa are being included. Some countries have joined in multi-national initiatives to measure, monitor and mitigate environmental impacts of ocean noise at large, trans-boundary spatial scales. Approaches to regulating ocean noise change as new scientific evidence becomes available, but may also differ by country. The OCEANOISE conference series has provided a platform for the exchange of scientific results, management approaches, research needs, stakeholder concerns, etc. Attendees have represented various sectors, including academia, offshore industry, defence, NGOs, consultants and government regulators. The published articles in the Special Issue cover a range of topics and applications central to ocean noise
UAVs for the Environmental Sciences
This book gives an overview of the usage of UAVs in environmental sciences covering technical basics, data acquisition with different sensors, data processing schemes and illustrating various examples of application
Indoor Positioning and Navigation
In recent years, rapid development in robotics, mobile, and communication technologies has encouraged many studies in the field of localization and navigation in indoor environments. An accurate localization system that can operate in an indoor environment has considerable practical value, because it can be built into autonomous mobile systems or a personal navigation system on a smartphone for guiding people through airports, shopping malls, museums and other public institutions, etc. Such a system would be particularly useful for blind people. Modern smartphones are equipped with numerous sensors (such as inertial sensors, cameras, and barometers) and communication modules (such as WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC, LTE/5G, and UWB capabilities), which enable the implementation of various localization algorithms, namely, visual localization, inertial navigation system, and radio localization. For the mapping of indoor environments and localization of autonomous mobile sysems, LIDAR sensors are also frequently used in addition to smartphone sensors. Visual localization and inertial navigation systems are sensitive to external disturbances; therefore, sensor fusion approaches can be used for the implementation of robust localization algorithms. These have to be optimized in order to be computationally efficient, which is essential for real-time processing and low energy consumption on a smartphone or robot
Proceedings of the European Conference on Agricultural Engineering AgEng2021
This proceedings book results from the AgEng2021 Agricultural Engineering Conference under auspices of the European Society of Agricultural Engineers, held in an online format based on the University of Évora,
Portugal, from 4 to 8 July 2021.
This book contains the full papers of a selection of abstracts that were the base for the oral presentations and posters presented at the conference.
Presentations were distributed in eleven thematic areas: Artificial Intelligence, data processing and
management; Automation, robotics and sensor technology; Circular Economy; Education and Rural development; Energy and bioenergy; Integrated and sustainable Farming systems; New application
technologies and mechanisation; Post-harvest technologies; Smart farming / Precision agriculture; Soil, land and water engineering; Sustainable production in Farm buildings
Circles within spirals, wheels within wheels; Body rotation facilitates critical insights into animal behavioural ecology
How animals behave is fundamental to enhancing their lifetime fitness, so defining how animals move in space and time relates to many ecological questions, including resource selection, activity budgets and animal movement networks. Historically, animal behaviour and movement has been defined by direct observation, however recent advancements in biotelemetry have revolutionised how we now assess behaviour, particularly allowing animals to be monitored when they cannot be seen. Studies now pair ‘convectional’ radio telemetries with motion sensors to facilitate more detailed investigations of animal space-use. Motion sensitive tags (containing e.g., accelerometers and magnetometers) provide precise data on body movements which characterise behaviour, and this has been exemplified in extensive studies using accelerometery data, which has been linked to space-use defined by GPS. Conversely, consideration of body rotation (particularly change in yaw) is virtually absent within the biologging literature, even though various scales of yaw rotation can reveal important patterns in behaviour and movement, with animal heading being a fundamental component characterising space-use. This thesis explores animal body angles, particularly about the yaw axis, for elucidating animal movement ecology. I used five model species (a reptile, a mammal and three birds) to demonstrate the value of assessing body rotation for investigating fine-scale movement-specific behaviours. As part of this, I advanced the ‘dead-reckoning’ method, where fine-scale animal movement between temporally poorly resolved GPS fixes can be deduced using heading vectors and speed. I addressed many issues with this protocol, highlighting errors and potential solutions but was able to show how this approach leads to insights into many difficult-to-study animal behaviours. These ranged from elucidating how and where lions cross supposedly impermeable man-made barriers to examining how penguins react to tidal currents and then navigate their way to their nests far from the sea in colonies enclosed within thick vegetation
LAVAPilot: Lightweight UAV Trajectory Planner with Situational Awareness for Embedded Autonomy to Track and Locate Radio-tags
Tracking and locating radio-tagged wildlife is a labor-intensive and
time-consuming task necessary in wildlife conservation. In this article, we
focus on the problem of achieving embedded autonomy for a resource-limited
aerial robot for the task capable of avoiding undesirable disturbances to
wildlife. We employ a lightweight sensor system capable of simultaneous (noisy)
measurements of radio signal strength information from multiple tags for
estimating object locations. We formulate a new lightweight task-based
trajectory planning method-LAVAPilot-with a greedy evaluation strategy and a
void functional formulation to achieve situational awareness to maintain a safe
distance from objects of interest. Conceptually, we embed our intuition of
moving closer to reduce the uncertainty of measurements into LAVAPilot instead
of employing a computationally intensive information gain based planning
strategy. We employ LAVAPilot and the sensor to build a lightweight aerial
robot platform with fully embedded autonomy for jointly tracking and planning
to track and locate multiple VHF radio collar tags used by conservation
biologists. Using extensive Monte Carlo simulation-based experiments,
implementations on a single board compute module, and field experiments using
an aerial robot platform with multiple VHF radio collar tags, we evaluate our
joint planning and tracking algorithms. Further, we compare our method with
other information-based planning methods with and without situational awareness
to demonstrate the effectiveness of our robot executing LAVAPilot. Our
experiments demonstrate that LAVAPilot significantly reduces (by 98.5%) the
computational cost of planning to enable real-time planning decisions whilst
achieving similar localization accuracy of objects compared to information gain
based planning methods, albeit taking a slightly longer time to complete a
mission.Comment: Accepted to 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent
Robots and Systems (IROS