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"Wikelski, Martin"
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The internet of animals : discovering the collective intelligence of life on Earth
\"All we need to do is give animals a voice and our perception of the world could change forever. That's what author Martin Wikelski and his team of scientists believe, and this book shares their story for the first time. As they tag animals around the world with minuscule tracking devices, they link their movements to The International Space Station, which taps into the 'internet of animals': an astonishing network of information made up of thousands of animals communicating with each other and their environments. Called the International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space, or ICARUS, this phenomenal project is poised to change our world. Down on the ground, Wikelski describes animals' sixth sense first-hand. Farm animals become restless when earthquakes are imminent. Animals on the African plains sense when poachers are on the move. Frigatebirds in South America depart before hurricanes arrive.\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Terrestrial animal tracking as an eye on life and planet
Researchers have long attempted to follow animals as they move through their environment. Until relatively recently, however, such efforts were limited to short distances and times in species large enough to carry large batteries and transmitters. New technologies have opened up new frontiers in animal tracking remote data collection. Hussey et al. review the unique directions such efforts have taken for marine systems, while Kays et al. review recent advances for terrestrial species. We have entered a new era of animal ecology, where animals act as both subjects and samplers of their environments. Science , this issue 10.1126/science.1255642 , 10.1126/science.aaa2478 Moving animals connect our world, spreading pollen, seeds, nutrients, and parasites as they go about the their daily lives. Recent integration of high-resolution Global Positioning System and other sensors into miniaturized tracking tags has dramatically improved our ability to describe animal movement. This has created opportunities and challenges that parallel big data transformations in other fields and has rapidly advanced animal ecology and physiology. New analytical approaches, combined with remotely sensed or modeled environmental information, have opened up a host of new questions on the causes of movement and its consequences for individuals, populations, and ecosystems. Simultaneous tracking of multiple animals is leading to new insights on species interactions and, scaled up, may enable distributed monitoring of both animals and our changing environment.
Journal Article
Perspectives in machine learning for wildlife conservation
Inexpensive and accessible sensors are accelerating data acquisition in animal ecology. These technologies hold great potential for large-scale ecological understanding, but are limited by current processing approaches which inefficiently distill data into relevant information. We argue that animal ecologists can capitalize on large datasets generated by modern sensors by combining machine learning approaches with domain knowledge. Incorporating machine learning into ecological workflows could improve inputs for ecological models and lead to integrated hybrid modeling tools. This approach will require close interdisciplinary collaboration to ensure the quality of novel approaches and train a new generation of data scientists in ecology and conservation.
Animal ecologists are increasingly limited by constraints in data processing. Here, Tuia and colleagues discuss how collaboration between ecologists and data scientists can harness machine learning to capitalize on the data generated from technological advances and lead to novel modeling approaches.
Journal Article
Going, Going, Gone: Is Animal Migration Disappearing
Most of the migrants are in little immediate danger of extinction; rather, they are becoming less and less common. [...]birdwatchers can still see all of the species of migratory songbirds they seek each spring; they simply have to work harder to do so. There may be a few places along its migratory route where numbers of cerulean warblers can be found, but the majority of birds probably move in a rather diffuse wave between the two continents. [...]it is unrealistic to imagine that any discrete set of migratory reserves will work for this species.
Journal Article
From local collective behavior to global migratory patterns in white storks
GPS tagging reveals leaders and followers among migrating white storks. What role do social dynamics play in guiding collective migrations? Identifying such dynamics requires following individual animals across long migratory distances. Flack et al. used GPS tags to follow individual juvenile white storks on their southern migration (see the Perspective by Nevitt). Birds generally fell into two categories: leaders and followers. Leaders sought out areas of thermal uplift, flapped less in transit, and flew farther. Followers followed leaders into thermals but had different trajectories, exhibited greater flapping effort, and flew shorter total distances. Science , this issue p. 911 ; see also p. 852 Soaring migrant birds exploit columns of rising air (thermals) to cover large distances with minimal energy. Using social information while locating thermals may benefit such birds, but examining collective movements in wild migrants has been a major challenge for researchers. We investigated the group movements of a flock of 27 naturally migrating juvenile white storks by using high-resolution GPS and accelerometers. Analyzing individual and group movements on multiple scales revealed that a small number of leaders navigated to and explored thermals, whereas followers benefited from their movements. Despite this benefit, followers often left thermals earlier and at lower height, and consequently they had to flap considerably more. Followers also migrated less far annually than did leaders. We provide insights into the interactions between freely flying social migrants and the costs and benefits of collective movement in natural populations.
Journal Article
ICARUS—Very Low Power Satellite-Based IoT
The ICARUS (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space) satellite IoT system was launched in 2020 to observe the life of animals on Earth: their migratory routes, living conditions, and causes of death. These findings will aid species conservation, protect ecosystem services by animals, measure weather and climate, and help forecast the spread of infectious zoonotic diseases and possibly natural disasters. The aim of this article is to explain the system design of ICARUS. Essential components are ‘wearables for wildlife’, miniature on-animal sensors, quantifying the health of animals and the surrounding environment on the move, and transmitting artificially intelligent summaries of these data globally. We introduce a new class of Internet-of-things (IoT) waveforms—the random-access, very-low-power, wide-area networks (RA-vLPWANs) which enable uncoordinated multiple access at very-low-signal power and low-signal-to-noise ratios. RA-vLPWANs used in ICARUS solve the problems hampering conventional low-power wide area network (LPWAN) IoT systems when applied to space communications. Prominent LPWANs are LoRA, SigFox, MIOTY, ESSA, NB-IoT (5G), or SCADA. Hardware and antenna aspects in the ground and the space segment are given to explain practical system constraints.
Journal Article
Evidence that birds sleep in mid-flight
Many birds fly non-stop for days or longer, but do they sleep in flight and if so, how? It is commonly assumed that flying birds maintain environmental awareness and aerodynamic control by sleeping with only one eye closed and one cerebral hemisphere at a time. However, sleep has never been demonstrated in flying birds. Here, using electroencephalogram recordings of great frigatebirds (
Fregata minor
) flying over the ocean for up to 10 days, we show that they can sleep with either one hemisphere at a time or both hemispheres simultaneously. Also unexpectedly, frigatebirds sleep for only 0.69 h d
−1
(7.4% of the time spent sleeping on land), indicating that ecological demands for attention usually exceed the attention afforded by sleeping unihemispherically. In addition to establishing that birds can sleep in flight, our results challenge the view that they sustain prolonged flights by obtaining normal amounts of sleep on the wing.
Whether and how birds sleep during long-distance flights has remained a mystery. Here, Rattenborg and colleagues show for the first time that frigatebirds can sleep during flight, but do so in remarkably small amounts.
Journal Article
“Closer‐to‐home” strategy benefits juvenile survival in a long‐distance migratory bird
Human‐induced changes in the climate and environment that occur at an unprecedented speed are challenging the existence of migratory species. Faced with these new challenges, species with diverse and flexible migratory behaviors may suffer less from population decline, as they may be better at responding to these changes by altering their migratory behavior. At the individual level, variations in migratory behavior may lead to differences in fitness and subsequently influence the population's demographic dynamics. Using lifetime GPS bio‐logging data from 169 white storks (Ciconia ciconia), we explore whether the recently shortened migration distance of storks affects their survival during different stages of their juvenile life. We also explore how other variations in migratory decisions (i.e., time, destination), movement activity (measured using overall body dynamic acceleration), and early life conditions influence juvenile survival. We observed that their first autumn migration was the riskiest period for juvenile white storks. Individuals that migrated shorter distances and fledged earlier experienced lower mortality risks. In addition, higher movement activity and overwintering “closer‐to‐home” (with 84.21% of the tracked individuals stayed Europe or North Africa) were associated with higher survival. Our study shows how avian migrants can change life history decisions over only a few decades, and thus it helps us to understand and predict how migrants respond to the rapidly changing world. Using bio‐logging data from a long‐distance migratory species, the white stork (Ciconia ciconia), we found that the individuals with shortened migration distance and those that overwintered in Europe and North Africa had higher survival probability during the juvenile stage, the riskiest life period for many migrants. In addition, higher movement activity and early fledging were associated with higher survival. Our study shows how avian migrants can adjust life history decisions linked to fitness over few decades.
Journal Article
Individual environmental niches in mobile organisms
Individual variation is increasingly recognized as a central component of ecological processes, but its role in structuring environmental niche associations remains largely unknown. Species’ responses to environmental conditions are ultimately determined by the niches of single individuals, yet environmental associations are typically captured only at the level of species. Here, we develop scenarios for how individual variation may combine to define the compound environmental niche of populations, use extensive movement data to document individual environmental niche variation, test associated hypotheses of niche configuration, and examine the consistency of individual niches over time. For 45 individual white storks (
Ciconia ciconia;
116 individual-year combinations), we uncover high variability in individual environmental associations, consistency of individual niches over time, and moderate to strong niche specialization. Within populations, environmental niches follow a nested pattern, with individuals arranged along a specialist-to-generalist gradient. These results reject common assumptions of individual niche equivalency among conspecifics, as well as the separation of individual niches into disparate parts of environmental space. These findings underscore the need for a more thorough consideration of individualistic environmental responses in global change research.
Understanding how individual niches vary can inform ecology and conservation. A study of 45 GPS-tracked white storks across three breeding populations reveals that individual environmental niches are nested, arranged along a specialist-generalist gradient that is highly consistent over time.
Journal Article
Space Use of Bumblebees (Bombus spp.) Revealed by Radio-Tracking
Accurate estimates of movement behavior and distances travelled by animals are difficult to obtain, especially for small-bodied insects where transmitter weights have prevented the use of radio-tracking.
Here, we report the first successful use of micro radio telemetry to track flight distances and space use of bumblebees. Using ground surveys and Cessna overflights in a Central European rural landscape mosaic we obtained maximum flight distances of 2.5 km, 1.9 km and 1.3 km for Bombus terrestris (workers), Bombus ruderatus (worker), and Bombus hortorum (young queens), respectively. Bumblebee individuals used large areas (0.25-43.53 ha) within one or a few days. Habitat analyses of one B. hortorum queen at the landscape scale indicated that gardens within villages were used more often than expected from habitat availability. Detailed movement trajectories of this individual revealed that prominent landscape structures (e.g. trees) and flower patches were repeatedly visited. However, we also observed long (i.e. >45 min) resting periods between flights (B. hortorum) and differences in flower-handling between bumblebees with and without transmitters (B. terrestris) suggesting that the current weight of transmitters (200 mg) may still impose significant energetic costs on the insects.
Spatio-temporal movements of bumblebees can now be tracked with telemetry methods. Our measured flight distances exceed many previous estimates of bumblebee foraging ranges and suggest that travelling long distances to food resources may be common. However, even the smallest currently available transmitters still appear to compromise flower handling performance and cause an increase in resting behavior of bees. Future reductions of transmitter mass and size could open up new avenues for quantifying landscape-scale space use of insect pollinators and could provide novel insights into the behavior and requirements of bumblebees during critical life stages, e.g. when searching for mates, nest locations or hibernation sites.
Journal Article