Did the battery last as expected? I want to know about equipments used to acquire movement data and if other researchers had problems with the power supply of the equipment and in which kind of environment they were monitoring the animals.
In France, some peoples are very skill by using GPS collars et other kinds of attachment of GPS on animals (mammals, birds, leezards).I can send you one official association with such very skill persons.: CEN PACA at Aix-en-Provence (South-Eastern France, department of Bouches-du-Rhône). The President is Vincent Kulesza and he manages about 20 field workers for biodiversity preservation. Among them, workers very skill in use of GPS attached on body of wild animals. You can write in English langage. Web site: www.cen-paca.org . E-mail address: [email protected]
I tracked dingoes in a wet tropical agricultural/forested landscape using Tellus 2A collars. The collars generally performed well; however, I found that none of the batteries lasted anywhere near as long as the battery-life calculator estimated they would. I assumed this was because when animals were in forest, with a dense canopy, the GPS spent a long time searching for satellites every time it switched on (and sometimes couldn't find enough within th
Hi Julia, we equiped 4 feral dogs (3 followed successfully, one collar destroyed by humans) with Tellus collars (from end of Dec2015 to May2016). The online management of the collars and the ability to track our animals almost realtime was perfect and the collars performed relatively well but the batteries as with Damian did not last as calculated or espected for two of them. With one of the collars the batery life was more or less acceptable but with another one the battery started to fluctuate almost within a month after release with small amout of fixes made. With this one we lost the SMS function (no data was received or visualized on the webcite) but UHF download was still working so we were able to retreive the collar. With the collar that survived longest we were not quick enough to use the drop-off function and now we have very big difficulties to retrieve the collar (we need to recapture the animal again but it disappears in split second seeing humans with something in hands). Our colleagues which use Tellus collars for bears and chamois also report problems of SMS function loss and batery life problems in half of their collars. So, to summarize - very good in immediate tracking (if you need to track them realtime) but not so much reliable in duration.
Same with me. For GPS collars tellus, the battery duration varied a lot even for individuals tracked in the same conditions (I am tracking peccaries that are social so I had more than one individual monitored per herd).
Hi Julia, dont know if you still need info. I use Tellus collars on leopards (fitted 4). Overall I was very impressed. We only tracked for 12-14 months, but batteries lasted that period. We remotely drop all the collars and could retrieve all collars, except one we could never find. Subsequently we photographed all the leopards without collars (with camera traps etc.). Collars had a success rate of 98%, with a schedule of 12 locations per day. I was very happy with these collars.
We have been using Followit Tellus GPS collars on muskoxen in Greenland. Of 39 deployments, we have had 7 malfunctions. One collar is still active at the moment with a expected life span of an additional ca 22 months. Hard to say if this ca 18% failure rate is normal and to be expected. Data wise we have been quite happy with quality of the location data of the functioning collars. One thing to note though: our newest collars seem to have less precise (more jumpy) GPS. Update 2023-01-29: We are no longer using Followit and have entirely swapped to Vectronic for our muskox study.
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