discussion / Biologging  / 22 February 2016

Performance of GPS-collars in wildlife research: what does the evidence show?

Calling on all conservation scientists and practitioners who have worked with GPS-collars for studying or monitoring wildlife worldwide!

Dear colleague,

have you ever deployed GPS-collars that didn't perform as expected and forced you to change or abandon your project objectives? Or have you observed exceptionally high collar performance in your study system? Either way, would you find it useful to have an easily accessible resource reporting success rates of GPS-collars under different conditions all over the world?

To produce just such a resource, we are looking for information on fix success rates of GPS-collars in projects of all sizes and in all locations. Projects that remained unpublished in scientific literature are especially needed, but information from published studies is welcomed too. If you have run projects using GPS-collars, and you want your deployment data to contribute to an evaluation of this wildlife research technique, please leave us your contact details using this short form, and we'll be in touch with you in the near future for a follow-up questionnaire. For clarity: we are only interested in the deployment information, not in any ecological data resulting from the deployment.

We thank you in advance for your collaboration, and look forward to hearing from you.

Please feel free to share this call with anyone who might be interested.

Maarten P.G. Hofman (1,2), Matthew W. Hayward (2), Julia P.G. Jones (2) and Niko Balkenhol (1)

1 Dept. of Wildlife Sciences, University of Göttingen, Germany

2 School of Environment, Natural Resources and Geography, Bangor University, Wales, UK

For more information about this survey: Maarten Hofman - +49 (0)155 39 33583 - [email protected] – https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Maarten_Hofman

PS: We apologize for any cross-posting.

PPS: In case the link in the mail body does not work, try copy-pasting the following survey URL into your browser:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1VNRFRg0W7hBjiQLAx517JFZkUiCgSLVfNox1Qox9Xq0/viewform?usp=send_form> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1VNRFRg0W7hBjiQLAx517JFZkUiCgSLVfNox1Qox9Xq0/viewform?usp=send_form




Hi Maarten, 

Are you only interested in GPS collars, or would you welcome feedback on any deployed GPS transmitter unit?

Abby Lawsen, a PhD candidate who studies alligators, got in touch with us on twitter to ask this question, so I imagine she's got some feedback on units deployed for Alligators that might be of interest for your study. 

Steph  

Hi Steph,

the survey is closed now, and I'm in the process of screening data. I hope to start with the analysis soon.

So unfortunately, nothing new or exciting yet...

Maarten