ReviewThe Journal of animal ecology2025
Sweat the small stuff: A review of the use of accelerometers to estimate energy expenditure in wild animals.
Review in The Journal of animal ecology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- From electrocardiography to energetics: methods, constraints, and practical considerations for heart rate biologging in small animals.Journal of comparative physiology. B, Biochemical, systemic, and environmental physiology · 2026Review
- Oilbirds performing non-seasonal intra-tropical migrations reduce flight effort compared to individuals that frequently return to the colony roost.Movement ecology · 2026Article
- Six decades of animal accelerometry: trends, applications, and future directions.Movement ecology · 2026Review
- Sweat the small stuff: A review of the use of accelerometers to estimate energy expenditure in wild animals.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Dynamic body acceleration (DBA), a measure of work based on Newtonian biomechanics, is a metric often used to estimate daily energy expenditure (DEE) with accelerometers, but studies validating DBA in wild animals have shown mixed results. I review all studies using accelerometry to measure energy expenditure in free-living (wild or farmed) animals, focussing on those that calibrate DBA against doubly labelled water or heart rate as the 'gold standard' for DEE. Most (~90%) energetics studies using DBA focus on endotherms, even though DBA may work better for ectotherms. In nearly all studies of endotherms, average DBA increased linearly with DEE, but the intercept of the DBA-DEE relationship was not constant across contexts-even within the same species. DBA-DEE relationships were stronger with mass-specific DEE and slightly stronger with vectorial DBA than overall DBA. In a case study of six seabird species with similar activity modes and physiologies, DBA-DEE slopes varied with activity, but were consistent across species for flight, implying that activity-specific slopes might be applied across species in some cases where sufficient sampling occurs within similar taxa. I offer recommendations for the use of DBA to estimate DEE. I explore the potential for a general physiological model across species, without species-specific calibrations, and note where the DBA-DEE relationship breaks down and where we need more data. DBA, used under appropriate conditions, is an index of energy use in many endotherms, and I encourage its use with more ecological questions.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.