WATLAS - Wadden Sea Advanced Tracking and Localisation of Animals in real life Systems

Title
WATLAS - Wadden Sea Advanced Tracking and Localisation of Animals in real life …
License
CC BY (Creative Commons Attribution International Public License) (CC BY)
+ This license lets others distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

+ For more info see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.
Abstract

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 individuals, 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 multiple species can reveal differential space use. For example, despite sanderlings and red knots roosting together, they foraged in different areas of the mudflats. The high-resolution tracking data collected by WATLAS offers many possibilities for research into the drivers of bird movement in the Wadden Sea. WATLAS could provide a tool for impact assessment, and thus aid nature conservation and management of the globally important Wadden Sea ecosystem.

Project website
https://www.nioz.nl/en/research/projects/4374-1
Keywords
SOPs
Outputs
Interested in publishing to OBIS
-
Data in OBIS
No; none of the biological data collected by the network is included in OBIS
Funding
Funding sector
Regions
Netherlands
Responsible
Point of Contact
allertbijleveld
Maintenance Frequency
Sub-Daily
Temporal Extent
January 2017 -
Supplemental Information
No information provided

Layer WMS GetCapabilities document

Attribute Name Label Description
fid_1
fid
begin
end

Comments (0 total)

Log in to add a comment

Favorite

Log in to add/delete Favorites.

EPSG
Encoding
Cancel