WATLAS:High throughput and real-time tracking of many small birds in the Dutch Wadden Sea

Tracking animal movement is important for understanding how animals interact with their (changing) environment, and crucial for predicting and explaining how animals are affected by anthropogenic activities. The Wadden Sea is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a region of global importance for millions of shorebirds. Due to climate change and anthropogenic activity, understanding and predicting movement and space-use in areas like the Wadden Sea is increasingly important. Monitoring and predicting animal movement, however, requires high-resolution tracking of many individuals. While high-resolut... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Bijleveld, Allert I.
van Maarseveen, Frank
Denissen, Bas
Dekinga, Anne
Penning, Emma
S. Ersoy, Selin
Gupte, Pratik
de Monte, Luc
ten Horn, Job
Bom, Roeland
Toledo, Sivan
Nathan, Ran
Beardsworth, Christine E.
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
Reihe/Periodikum: Bijleveld , A I , van Maarseveen , F , Denissen , B , Dekinga , A , Penning , E , S. Ersoy , S , Gupte , P , de Monte , L , ten Horn , J , Bom , R , Toledo , S , Nathan , R & Beardsworth , C E 2022 , ' WATLAS : High throughput and real-time tracking of many small birds in the Dutch Wadden Sea ' , Animal Biotelemetry , vol. 10 , pp. 1-17 . https://doi.org/10.1186/s40317-022-00307-w
Schlagwörter: animal tracking / ATLAS / biologging / biotelemetry / conservation / high-throughput movement ecology / reverse-gps / shorebirds / space use / Wadden Sea UNESCO World Heritage Site
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-26670309
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://hdl.handle.net/11370/16129e4e-a50e-4e94-8b70-778e7ed0351f

Tracking animal movement is important for understanding how animals interact with their (changing) environment, and crucial for predicting and explaining how animals are affected by anthropogenic activities. The Wadden Sea is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a region of global importance for millions of shorebirds. Due to climate change and anthropogenic activity, understanding and predicting movement and space-use in areas like the Wadden Sea is increasingly important. Monitoring and predicting animal movement, however, requires high-resolution tracking of many individuals. While high-resolution tracking has been made possible through GPS, trade-offs between tag weight and battery life limit its use to larger species. Here, we introduce WATLAS (the Wadden Sea deployment of the ATLAS tracking system) capable of monitoring the movements of hundreds of (small) birds simultaneously in the Dutch Wadden Sea. WATLAS employs an array of receiver stations that can detect and localize small, low-cost tags at fine spatial (metres) and temporal resolution (seconds). From 2017 to 2021, we tracked red knots, sanderlings, bar- tailed godwits, and common terns. We use parts of these data to give four use-cases revealing its performance and demonstrating how WATLAS can be used to study numerous aspects of animal behaviour, such as, space-use (both intra- and inter-specific), among-individual variation, and social networks across levels of organization: from individu- als, to species, to populations, and even communities. After describing the WATLAS system, we first illustrate space- use of red knots across the study area and how the tidal environment affects their movement. Secondly, we show large among-individual differences in distances travelled per day, and thirdly illustrate how high-throughput WATLAS data allows calculating a proximity-based social network. Finally, we demonstrate that using WATLAS to monitor mul- tiple species can reveal differential space use. For example, despite sanderlings and red knots roosting ...