Data collection and storage in long-term ecological and evolutionary studies : The Mongoose 2000 system

Studying ecological and evolutionary processes in the natural world often requires research projects to follow multiple individuals in the wild over many years. These projects have provided significant advances but may also be hampered by needing to accurately and efficiently collect and store multiple streams of the data from multiple individuals concurrently. The increase in the availability and sophistication of portable computers (smartphones and tablets) and the applications that run on them has the potential to address many of these data collection and storage issues. In this paper we describe the challenges faced by one such long-term, individual-based research project: the Banded Mongoose Research Project in Uganda. We describe a system we have developed called Mongoose 2000 that utilises the potential of apps and portable computers to meet these challenges. We discuss the benefits and limitations of employing such a system in a long-term research project. The app and source code for the Mongoose 2000 system are freely available and we detail how it might be used to aid data collection and storage in other long-term individual-based projects.Peer reviewe

Data from: Kin discrimination via odour in the cooperatively breeding banded mongoose

Kin discrimination is often beneficial for group-living animals as it aids in inbreeding avoidance and providing nepotistic help. In mammals, the use of olfactory cues in kin discrimination is widespread and may occur through learning the scents of individuals that are likely to be relatives, or by assessing genetic relatedness directly through assessing odour similarity (phenotype matching). We use scent presentations to investigate these possibilities in a wild population of the banded mongoose Mungos mungo, a cooperative breeder in which inbreeding risk is high and females breed communally, disrupting behavioural cues to kinship. We find that adults show heightened behavioural responses to unfamiliar (extra-group) scents than to familiar (within-group) scents. Interestingly, we found that responses to familiar odours, but not unfamiliar odours, varied with relatedness. This suggests that banded mongooses are either able to use an effective behavioural rule to identify likely relatives from within their group, or that phenotype matching is used in the context of within-group kin recognition but not extra-group kin recognition. In other cooperative breeders, familiarity is used within the group and phenotype matching may be used to identify unfamiliar kin. However, for the banded mongoose this pattern may be reversed, most likely due to their unusual breeding system which disrupts within-group behavioural cues to kinship

Banded mongoose scent presentation data for Dryad

The data file contains data collected from presentations of banded mongoose (Mungos mungo) anal gland secretion to familiar and unfamiliar conspecifics in Mweya (Uganda) in 2014. Response variables are: (1) Total marks: the number of scent marks deposited on or around the odour (within 30 cm), including urinating, depositing faeces and anal marking. (2) Contact: the time (s) spent inspecting the odour (nose within 30 cm). (3) Duration: the time (s) before returning to foraging behaviour, defined here as digging in topsoil/dung or vegetation or eating food items. Explanatory variables are shortened as follows: Recip = Recipient, and Odour = Odour Donor. The Age, Sex (1 = female, 0 = male), Pack (social group code), ID (identity code of the individual mongoose), and the Relatedness between the donor and recipient (calculated using up to 43 microsatellite loci)

Managing hypertension in a Rohingya refugee camp: a brief report

Non-communicable diseases have overtaken communicable diseases as the most common cause of death worldwide, with the majority of these deaths in low-income and middle-income countries. Hypertension alone causes over nine million deaths per year.Since 2017, around 750 000 Rohingya refugees have fled violence in Myanmar into Cox’s Bazar District in Bangladesh. We describe a quality improvement project focused on the management of hypertension in Rohingya refugees in three primary health facilities within the Rohingya refugee camps. The aim of the project was to create a sustainable hypertension service within existing primary care services.A number of plan–do–study–act cycles were performed to improve care, with methods including: creating a specialised clinic, writing a treatment algorithm, training of pharmacists, engaging community health workers and educational programmes for staff and patients.In 2020, 554 patients were engaged in the new hypertension service. Of these, 358 (64.6%) returned for follow-up at least once. Mean systolic blood pressure (BP) was 141.7 (SD 60.0) mm Hg and mean diastolic BP was 88.1 (SD 11.1) mm Hg. Patients engaged in treatment had a significant reduction of BP of 8.2 (95% CI 5.4 to 11.0)/6.0 (95% CI 4.1 to 7.9) mm Hg (p<0.0001).Our project shows that it is possible to create a hypertension service in a challenging humanitarian crisis, which can successfully improve the control of hypertension, although retention in care can be difficult

Evaluation of a digital triage platform in Uganda: A quality improvement initiative to reduce the time to antibiotic administration.

BackgroundSepsis is the leading cause of death in children under five in low- and middle-income countries. The rapid identification of the sickest children and timely antibiotic administration may improve outcomes. We developed and implemented a digital triage platform to rapidly identify critically ill children to facilitate timely intravenous antibiotic administration.ObjectiveThis quality improvement initiative sought to reduce the time to antibiotic administration at a dedicated children's hospital outpatient department in Mbarara, Uganda.Intervention and study designThe digital platform consisted of a mobile application that collects clinical signs, symptoms, and vital signs to prioritize children through a combination of emergency triggers and predictive risk algorithms. A computer-based dashboard enabled the prioritization of children by displaying an overview of all children and their triage categories. We evaluated the impact of the digital triage platform over an 11-week pre-implementation phase and an 11-week post-implementation phase. The time from the end of triage to antibiotic administration was compared to evaluate the quality improvement initiative.ResultsThere was a difference of -11 minutes (95% CI, -16.0 to -6.0; p ConclusionA data-driven patient prioritization and continuous feedback for healthcare workers enabled by a digital triage platform led to expedited antibiotic therapy for critically ill children with sepsis. This platform may have a more significant impact in facilities without existing triage processes and prioritization of treatments, as is commonly encountered in low resource settings

Variable ecological conditions promote male helping by changing banded mongoose group composition.

PublishedArticle© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Ecological conditions are expected to have an important influence on individuals’ investment in cooperative care. However, the nature of their effects is unclear: both favorable and unfavorable conditions have been found to promote helping behavior. Recent studies provide a possible explanation for these conflicting results by suggesting that increased ecological variability, rather than changes in mean conditions, promote cooperative care. However, no study has tested whether increased ecological variability promotes individual- level helping behavior or the mechanisms involved. We test this hypothesis in a long-term study population of the cooperatively breeding banded mongoose, Mungos mungo, using 14 years of behavioral and meteorological data to explore how the mean and variability of ecological conditions influence individual behavior, body condition, and survival. Female body condition was more sensitive to changes in rainfall leading to poorer female survival and pronounced male-biased group compositions after periods of high rainfall variability. After such periods, older males invested more in helping behavior, potentially because they had fewer mating opportunities. These results provide the first empirical evidence for increased individual helping effort in more variable ecological conditions and suggest this arises because of individual differences in the effect of ecological conditions on body condition and survival, and the knock-on effect on social group composition. Individual differences in sensitivity to environmental variability, and the impacts this has on the internal structure and composition of animal groups, can exert a strong influence on the evolution and maintenance of social behaviors, such as cooperative care.Natural Environment Research CouncilEuropean Research Council Starting Grant (SOCODEV

A schematic of the Mongoose 2000 system.

<p>Data are collected at the field site using Android tablets. When fieldworkers return to the field site office they connect the tablets to a Raspberry Pi server running a local Wi-Fi network (Mongoose-web). The tablets synchronise their data to this central server and are also able to download the entire database and email it to UK-based mongoose researchers at the University of Exeter (or any other external location).</p

Data supporting Marshall et al. (2017) in Ecology and Evolution

This data supports the following publication: <div><br></div><div>Marshall HH, Vitikainen EIK, Mwanguhya F, Businge R, Kyabulima S, Hares MC, Inzani E, Kalema-Zikusosa G, Mwesige K, Nichols HJ, Sanderson JL and Cant MA (2017). Lifetime fitness consequences of early-life ecological hardship in a wild mammal population. <em>Ecology and Evolution</em><br></div><div><em><br></em></div><div>See read me.txt file for further information</div

Past and present data collection interfaces.

<p>The handheld devices interfaces and checksheets used by the Banded Mongoose Research Project previously (a-c) and in the Mongoose 2000 system (d-f). Panel a: Psion II data logger, model LZ; b: handheld Garmin eTrex GPS unit; c: example of a paper checksheet, here listing all the individuals present in group 1H on a given day.</p