Assessment of a livestock GPS collar based on an open-source datalogger informs best practices for logging intensity.

ABSTRACT: Ecologists have used Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to track animals for 30 years. Issues today include logging frequency and precision in estimating space use and travel distances, as well as battery life and cost. We developed a low-cost (~US$125), open-source GPS datalogger based on Arduino. To test the system, we collected positions at 20-s intervals for several 1-week durations from cattle and sheep on rangeland in North Dakota. We tested two questions of broad interest to ecologists who use GPS collars to track animal movements: (1) How closely do collared animals cluster in their herd? (2) How well do different logging patterns estimate patch occupancy and total daily distance traveled? Tested logging patterns included regular logging (one position every 5 or 10 min), and burst lo

SUBMITTER: McGranahan DA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6010917 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature