ArticleEcology and evolution2024
Tracking Small Animals in Complex Landscapes: A Comparison of Localisation Workflows for Automated Radio Telemetry Systems.
Article in Ecology and evolution, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Enabling high-resolution wildlife tracking: antenna beam-based approach including novel per-position error estimations for automated radiotelemetry systems.Movement ecology · 2026Article
- Windy weather drives social structure in wild zebra finches.Movement ecology · 2026Article
- Pollination ecology in the tropical Andes: moving towards a cross-scale approach.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- High spatial pair cohesion during and after breeding in a socially monogamous territorial passerine.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Automated radio telemetry systems (ARTS) have the potential to revolutionise our understanding of animal movement by providing a near-continuous record of individual locations in the wild. However, localisation errors in ARTS data can be very high, especially in natural landscapes with complex vegetation structure and topography. This curtails the research questions that may be addressed with this technology. We set up an ARTS grid in a valley with heterogeneous vegetation cover in the Colombian high Andes and applied an analytical pipeline to test the effectiveness of localisation methods. We performed calibration trials to simulate animal movement in high- or low-flight, or walking on the ground, and compared workflows with varying decisions related to signal cleaning, selection, smoothing, and interpretation, along with four multilateration approaches. We also quantified the influence of spatial features on the system's accuracy. Results showed large variation in localisation error, ranging between 0.4-43.4 m and 474-1929 m, depending on the localisation method used. We found that the selection of higher radio signal strengths and data smoothing based on the temporal autocorrelation are useful tools to improve accuracy. Moreover, terrain ruggedness, height of movement, vegetation type, and the location of animals inside or outside the grid area influence localisation error. In the case of our study system, thousands of location points were successfully estimated for two high-altitude hummingbird species that previously lacked movement data. Our case study on hummingbirds suggests ARTS grids can be used to estimate small animals' home ranges, associations with vegetation types, and seasonality in occurrence. We present a comparative localisation pipeline, highlighting the variety of possible decisions while processing radio signal data. Overall, this study provides guidance to improve the resolution of location estimates, broadening the application of this tracking technology in the study of the spatial ecology of wild populations.
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