SMART collars help track and conserve wildlife

Caleb Bryce drops into a ravine and tucks into the shadows. The dry foliage bursts into confetti as a puma careens up the opposite bank, hounds wailing close behind. Bryce and other scientists leap in pursuit. The big cat skirts a meadow and vaults into a fir tree. Wide-eyed, she pants as saliva streams from her jaw. When a shot hits its mark, the puma jumps to ground and streaks away. SMART collars record an expanded suite of data compare with GPS collars, providing a potentially important tool for conserving wildlife and minimizing clashes with people. Image courtesy of Sebastian Kennerknecht (www.pumapix.com). This heated chase is part of efforts to tranquilize and study pumas. As the animals continue to encroach on towns and cities, there’s an urgent need to understand their movements and behavior. In essence, scientists want to know what it takes for a large mammal to survive in a landscape shared more and more with people. To find out, they developed collars that do much more than pinpoint animal locations: they also track a complex suite of movements and measure energy expenditure. Their findings, and these seemingly simple collar advances, could help better conserve wildlife and protect humans worldwide. For decades, GPS tracking collars have revealed an animal’s location, indicating the distance traveled between position readings, but not whether the animal moved directly or took side trips. And GPS collars alone don’t indicate whether the animal ran or walked from point to point. These behaviors affect the energy an animal expends, which can be crucial to predicting and protecting its range. Species Movement, Acceleration, and Radio Tracking collars—SMART collars—aren’t a conservation panacea, but they’re proving to be a crucial …