ICT experts and engineers of the Department of Information engineering and science (DISI) of the University of Trento and of the Bruno Kessler Foundation, in cooperation with the biologists of the Edmund Mach Foundation developed a new type of radio-collars for animals which are potentially revolutionary for ethology, the scientific discipline which studies the animal behaviours.
The interdisciplinary collaboration gained the winning of the Best Paper Award, the Award for the Best Technological Study at the important international conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN 2015), one of the most important conferences in the field of networks of wireless sensors.
Gian Pietro Picco, Director of DISI and one of the project’s coordinators, explained “The technological innovation element of the collars is the fact that they allow us the remote monitoring when animals “meet” or get close to precise spots, like water ponds or feeding structures. In this way we can study the animal interactions and the interaction with the environment in a more effective way, thus providing biologists an unprecedented quantity of data”
Francesca Cagnacci, researcher of the Mach Foundation, added: “The future prospects, from a biological and ethological viewpoint, are extremely promising. The new technology monitors the meeting among animals and to locate them. No other commercial or experimental device provides this functionality. Hence the opportunity to carry out researches on animals which were thought impossible up to know. For example, we can now understand if the animal moves in one area ore in another, due to the fact that it has recently met another animal”.
Amy Murphy, researcher at the Bruno Kessler Foundation explained “The radio-collars made in Trentino are based on a solution which combines and integrates two types of technologies: GPS and radio low power, similar to the Bluetooth systems. We tried to fully exploit the cutting-edge technologies, starting from dedicated and innovative technical solutions. And, it seems, we were right! Our project is gaining consensus and interest all over the world. We are currently cooperating with Canadian colleagues to monitor deer and in the UK and Estonia to monitor the urban foxes”.
ICT and biology are combined to better study the fauna of our area. “Our initial objective was to use the collar to monitor deer”, according to Picco – However, we implemented a different version which can be applied to bears, above all to monitor the most problematic individuals. The prototype has already been successfully presented to the Autonomous Province of Trento, which uses our collars and fixed nodes located around areas to be protected, like farms, beehives and manures. The collars warns the forestry service when bears get too close to these areas and “frightens” them, automatically activating deterrence systems”.