Hi Andrea,

The OpenLog Artemis might be an option. I haven't used one of these yet, but its what I immediately thought of. Built in real time clock and IMU that records to microSD. It has four 14-bit ADCs and I2C connectors for the 'Qwiic' or 'grove' sensor boards. I'm not sure if it has programmable on/off cycles with the clock but you may find an existing project that does this. 

Hi Maggie!

This sounds like a really interesting - and challenging project!

UHF is used for tranfer of acceleration data (along with other stuff like magnetometry and GNSS locations) by systems developed by companies like Milsar and TechnoSmart. 

Ceres Wild uses satellite transfer over the GlobalStar but no raw acceleration data is transmitted.

I would fear the bandwidth would be too restrictive if you insist in using satellite based transfer of accelerometry.

Cheers,

Lars

This sounds like a lot of fun!

The lowest cost satellite comm I know of is https://swarm.space/.  It's pretty cool tech, but the data rates are quite low.

Do you have any idea how much data you need to move per day on average?

Perhaps LoRa would be an option?  Here is an example of a LoRa device https://www.adafruit.com/product/4284

LoRa is not satellite, but it has quite a long range which may suffice?  It is also pretty low data rate, but it is a good deal better than Swarm.  The best thing about LoRa is that the end-point can be very low power, so battery life can be quite good.

If you know somewhere the crocs frequent, you might also be able to work something out with Bluetooth LE?  Both LoRa and Bluetooth would require the installation of at least one base station.  Lora's base station could be substantially further way.

I have a few suggestions Maggie. Hopefully one or more will be useful. 

Preprocessing - Compressing the data before transmission will reduce file size and reduce transmission time.

Reduce data volume - I guess the animals are only active for some periods and a lot of the time are just "cruising along". So a useful strategy could be to only start recording when a certain threshold of acceleration occurs. And if you also buffer the data for say 10 seconds, you will get info about what's leading up to the activity. And adding a GPS module you will get some info on where the activity occurred plus movements prior. This will of course increase the data volume but only recording the most recent location will probably suffice as the location of the previous activity will tell you how far the animal moved.

Use LoRa instead of satellite - LoRa is well suited to this type of application. I saw in 

that the home range of crocodiles is relatively small so although a forested area will limit LoRa performance, the range should be sufficient. You could also use multiple base stations if needed. 

Of course eventually the data that has been recorded at the LoRa base station(s) will need to be collected. You could add a long range radio to the base station, or just collect the data 'manually'.

Hope this helps

This is an area where my system would do very well in:



 

Also, as you mention areas dominated by humans, there is a high likelyhood that there will be enough power there to support this system, which provides very high performance and flexibility but it comes with a power and somewhat a cost cost.



Additionally, it's life blood comes with generating alerts and making security and evidence gathering practical and manageable, with it's flexible state management system.



Ping me offline if you would like to have a look at the system.

Hi Amit,

The most important thing is that the livestock owners contact you as soon as possible after finding the carcass. We commonly do two things if they contact us on the same day or just after the livestock was killed:

1. Use CyberTracker (or similar software) on an Android smart phone to record all tracks, bite marks, feeding pattern and any other relevant signs of the reason for the loss with pictures and GPS coordinates. [BTW, Compensation is a big issue -- What do you do if the livestock was stolen? What do you do if a domestic animal killed the livestock? What if it died from disease or natural causes and was scavenged upon by carnivores afterwards?]
2. In the case of most cats, they would hide the prey (or just mark it by covering it with grass or branches and urinating in the area). In this case you can put up a camera trap on the carcass to capture the animal when it returns to its kill (Reconyx is good if you can afford it - we use mostly Cuddeback with white flash). This will normally only work if the carcass is fresh (so other predators would not be able to smell it and not know where it is yet), so the camera only has to be up for 3-5 days max.

This is not really high-tech, but can be very useful to not only establish which predator was responsible (or if a predator was responsible), but also to record all the evidence for that.

Hi Krasi! Greetings from Brazil!



That's a cool journey you've started! Congratulations. And I felt like theSearchLife resonates with the work I'm involved round here. In a nutshell, I live at the heart of the largest remaining of Atlantic forest in the planet - one of the most biodiverse biomes that exist. The subregion where I live is named after and bathed by the "Rio Sagrado" (Sacred River), a magnificent water body with a very rich cultural significance to the region (it has served as a safe zone for fleeing slaves). Well, the river and the entire bioregion is currently under the threat of a truly devastating railroad project which, to say the least is planned to cut through over 100 water springs! 



In face of that the local community (myself included) has been mobilizing to raise awareness of the issue and hopefully stop this madness (fueled by strong international forces). One of the ways we've been fighting this is through the seeking of the recognition of the sacred river as an entity of legal rights, who can manifest itself in court, against such threats. And to illustrate what this would look like, I've been developing this AI (LLM) powered avatar for the river, which could maybe serve as its human-relatable voice. An existing prototype of such avatar is available here. It has been fine-tuned with over 20 scientific papers on the Sacred River watershed.



And right now myself and other are mobilizing to manifest the conditions/resources to develop a next version of the avatar, which would include remote sensing capacities so the avatar is directly connected to the river and can possibly write full scientific reports on its physical properties (i.e. water quality) and the surrounding biodiversity. In fact, myself and 3 other members of the WildLabs community have just applied to the WildLabs Grant program in order to accomplish that. Hopefully the results are positive.



Finally, it's worth mentioning that our mobilization around providing an expression medium for the river has been multimodal, including the creation of a shortfilm based on theatrical mobilizations we did during a fest dedicated to the river and its surrounding more-than-human communities. You can check that out here:



 

Let's chat if any of that catches your interest!

Cheers!