The Wildlife Movement Institute Mission

Our mission is to advance wildlife movement ecology by providing accessible resources and fostering a community for open-source animal tracking solutions. To realize our vision, we formed The Wildlife Movement Institute, a nonprofit organization to be a hub for this community for local, regional, and international collaborations – whether you are an expert or someone passionate about wildlife and technology.

Problems Addressed and Why This Matters

Climate change is already impacting wildlife worldwide. WMI is working to provide solutions to understand better how wildlife will respond to a changing climate. From understanding threatened and endangered species habitat use to human-wildlife conflicts and invasive species, WMI is working to establish a community to help better deal with these challenges. The overarching theme of this community is a synthesis of movement ecology and tracking technology, focusing on using this knowledge to help address species' responses to climate change. As movement is essential for everything an animal does in its lifetime, understanding animal movement helps us identify how individuals select habitats and determine the impacts on life history traits and residence patterns. These data are paramount to informing and improving species protection from anthropogenic threats, from climate change to human encroachment. As climate change is more pressing now than ever, a core component of the infrastructure for response is determining how policies will impact species. Understanding how native and non-native wildlife responds not only to climate change but to our policies for reductions in GHGs is critical to their management and conservation.

Status Quo and How We Plan to Change That

Although radio telemetry has been used to monitor animal movements since the mid-1960s, it was not until the invention of GPS loggers that truly detailed observations of individual movements became possible. However, commercial, proprietary animal tracking systems are expensive and often out of reach for researchers. The number of trackers that can be purchased is too low to gain robust information, thus stifling innovation and vital information to inform species management. The growing trend of using microcontrollers to design tracking units is undoubtedly a revolutionary improvement in wildlife movement ecology. Technology does not care what animal it tracks so long as it does not impede mobility when attached.

Despite the growing community of tracking biologists creating a higher demand for movement data, no community is dedicated to supporting the development of accurate, affordable, open-source trackers and related software and methods. We plan to decentralize the development and manufacturing of animal tracking devices which are integral to the success of our community, leveraging DeSci and other Web 3.0 tools. These tools will support developing a well-governed, decentralized community and document published workflows to replicate and quickly build upon prior work. Ned is a DeSci Labs beta tester for DeSci Nodes and is engaging with other DeSci projects to learn how best to apply and participate in developing those tools to realize our vision.

What we want to accomplish

Our primary goal is to build a community to support the open-source development and application of animal tracking software, hardware, and methods to economically and ethically track animal movements. Some initial ideas toward reaching that goal include:

Leveraging Web3 tools to fund, publish, organize, and equitably acknowledge and reward the work and accomplishments of individuals to learn from prior successes and failures more efficiently and effectively,

Implementing existing hardware to the extent practical and designing new hardware when sensible for reliable trackers suitable for a broad range of taxa,

Developing software to facilitate customizing movement recording protocols and real-time tracking,

Generating and distributing funding to support work done by community members, and

Promoting scientific literacy with the public through the community as an outreach platform through visualization of animal movement data and open-source content for biologging development.

Why we need help

Although The Wildlife Movement Institute was created about two years ago, the progress toward creating a community has been slow. Funds from this grant round will be used to finalize the legal requirements required to gain 501c3 status. Some tasks and anticipated near-term budget expenditures include:

Upgrading our web platform to organize and sustain a community

Covering costs for the development and production of new hardware for tracking small to medium-sized animals

Hosting webinars and workshops to promote the use of low-cost, open-licensed tracking hardware and software

Providing funding for bounties to support website development and create documentation related to building, programming, and deploying animal trackers

Previous funding from Gitcoin:

Funding from Gitcoin Round 15 $2,300 – received November 2022

Funding from Alpha round as part of the climate research bundle $900 – received April 2023

What we accomplished with the funds:

-Started the process to organize WMI into a 501(c)(3) charitable organization -Created a website -Designed an open-source tracker and enclosure for testing on different taxa.

An Unexpected Journey: How We Got Here

The Wildlife Movement Institute was founded as a community where engineers and scientists collaborate to create affordable open-source animal trackers and movement ecology-based educational resources. A realization occurred that no such community existed, and with trackers costing thousands of dollars, a few wildlife professionals decided to change the status quo. The journey leading up to this grant proposal started in 2019 when a student at Sewanee, The University of the South, contacted Ned Horning about different options for tracking Diamondback Terrapins. Based on Ned’s background with GPS and GNSS technology, and after some tinkering, a small DIY proof of concept tracker that provided tracking information in real-time was created, costing less than a fraction of a proprietary tracker using cutting-edge Long-Range (LoRa) technology and Long-Range Wireless Access Network (LoRaWAN) protocol in tandem with The Internet of Things (IoT). In 2020 Ned created the Terrapin Tracker project, which was a finalist for the Con X Tech Prize managed by Conservation X Labs, and he was able to form a small team to refine the trackers and related software.

Linked by a common study organism, the diamondback terrapin, Jason Alstad reached out and suggested the creation of an organization to support open-source support for animal tracking. In the spring and summer of 2021, the first prototype trackers were tested in the field in South Carolina and Georgia. Unfortunately, the trackers did not perform as well as expected due to the animal’s behavior, and the process of learning from our mistakes began.

In Spring 2022, we implemented the next generation of trackers on Blandings Turtles, a semi-aquatic turtle in the Hudson Valley of New York. Through this collaborative work with The Wetland Trust, we met Adam Parlin, a post-doc at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Adam had previously worked with tracking technology on turtles, from electrocardiograms and GPS in free-living individuals. He has been working on applying those techniques to studying squirrel movements based on some of his tracker designs this fall.

After our last GR15, we were contacted by Dahlia Foo, Ph.D., a researcher from Tasmania interested in marine mammal trackers. With her expertise, The Wildlife Movement Institute has propelled the community forward with Dahlia’s help in designing our website, organizational planning, and her overall expertise in seal ecology. Going forward, The Wildlife Movement Institute plans to develop affordable open-source VHF, GPS, and acoustic trackers systems, with databases for enclosure designs, attachment methods, and educational resources to help wildlife professionals worldwide.