BANGALORE, INDIA: Tracking animals or birds is viewed as essential to study their habitat,movement patterns and behavior. Today, a whole range of devices are available in the market that can go with birds or animals irrespective of their sizes.
 
The CIOL Special on Technology in Wildlife Research and Tracking brings you a peak into the profile of various vendors.

Lotek: Specializes in GPS collars for small to large mammals. Their collars contain a VHF tracking beacon. Other innovations include remote two-way communication, which allows you to retrieve data on demand and/or reprogram the collar while it is still on the animal. Temperature and mortality sensors as well as field uploads and downloads. All the GPS wildlife tracking collars can be equipped with a remote release mechanism or a drop-off mechanism that is activated after the expiration of a factory pre-programmed time delay.

Televilt: The Swedish manufacture has three different types of collars as well as backpacks for birds. The GPS-Simplex uses a radio link while GPS-Direct and GPS-Weblink use a cell phone modem (GSM 900/1800). All systems can be fitted with a drop off (pre-programmed or remote control release). Televilt only uses Lithium batteries. GPS-Direct and GPS-Weblink are customer programmable while on animal.

Telemetry Solutions: The Californian based telemetry company is involved in GPS wildlife tracking since 1998. The company has been working on a proper GPS collar. The project focuses on equipment reliability (expressed in back-up VHF beacon, two built-in drop off units, custom made GPS receiver amplifier etc.) and how the product is supported. TS intends to deliver a very reliable system and back it up with customer support.

BlueSky Telemetry: The UK based manufacturer produces GPS tracking collars. The modular design of each collar range enables the biologist to pick and choose different components to suit their individual application. The following options are available: GSM mobile telephone engine, UHF radio modem and Satellite telephone engine, enabling remote setup and download. Other options include Programmable remote drop-off, Temperature, Mortality and Activity sensors and a VHF or UHF radio
telemetry beacon.

Telonics: It has a long history in manufacturing wildlife telemetry, conventional telemetry and tracking devices. Their Store-on-Board GPS Collars for animal tracking applications, with or without ARGOS Uplink, are only part of a program of quality electronics for wildlife, environmental research and special applications.

Wildlife Track Inc: The company develops and manufactures telemetry and direction finding systems. Their GPS wildlife tracking collars store up to 6240 three-dimensional locations with date and time in nonvolatile memory. Nominal weight is 500 gr and a VHF beacon is standard on all collars. GPS battery lasts up to 7 years (one fix per day). GPS collar circumference is adjustable and WGS 84 or NAD 83 Datums can be specified upon ordering.

The Advanced Telemetry Systems: The company produces GPS Remote Release Collar that can be remotely triggered to drop off the animal on command with the available ATS Command Unit. The collar will also automatically drop off as it reaches the end of its battery life to ensure data retrieval. Up to 8190 locations can be stored on board the unit. The collar incorporates a VHF transmitter to signal location, the status of the last GPS co-ordinate, mortality and battery conditions. The ATS collar also provides data on animal activity, ambient temperature, mortality, VHF duty cycle program, battery voltage and the amount of time logged on the battery backup.

North Star: The company has developed a line of animal GPS collars and bird borne platform transmitter terminals (PTT’s). Acquisition of GPS locations for store and forward through a satellite service provider can be programmed in a variety of duty cycles.