The Internet of Animals: How we can benefit from the collective wisdom of life | 9am PT Tues Nov 28

[Grigory Bronevetsky]

Modeling Talks

The Internet of Animals: How we can benefit from the collective wisdom of life Prof. Dr. Martin Wikelski, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior Tuesday, Nov 24 | 9am PT Meet | Youtube Stream Hi all, The presentation will be via Meet and all questions will be addressed there. If you cannot attend live, the event will be recorded and can be found afterward at https://sites.google.com/modelingtalks.org/entry/the-internet-of-animals Abstract: The collective wisdom of the Earth´s animals provides an immense bio-treasure of unprecedented information for humankind. Learning from animals in the ´Internet of Animals´ can help us predict natural catastrophes, forecast global zoonotic disease spreads or safeguard food resources while monitoring in situ every corner of the planet. The evolved senses of animals as well as technical sensors on animal-borne tracking tags enables local earth observations at highest spatial and temporal resolution. To protect and understand the ecosystem services provided by animals, we need to monitor individual animals seamlessly on a global scale. At the same time, these unprecedented life-history data of individual wild animals provide deep, novel insight into fundamental biological processes. The ICARUS initiative, an international bottom-up, science-driven technology development of small, cheap and autonomous IoT (Internet of Things) sensing devices for animal movement and behavior is aiming towards this: wearables for wildlife. The resulting big data available in the open-source data base Movebank help understand, monitor, predict and protect life on our planet.   Bio: Martin Wikelski is the Director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (formerly Ornithology) in Radolfzell (Germany), Professor in Biology at the University of Konstanz and member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Previously, he held positions at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA; Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Princeton University. His specialization is the study of global animal movement.  More information on previous and future talks: https://sites.google.com/modelingtalks.org/entry/home

[Grigory Bronevetsky]

Video Recording: https://youtu.be/bUC3IFGyXFA

Slides:

- pptx: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZBPSiCVCIPVNOLc1f3fs7QEuXIfglOKz/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=110584304018462442605&rtpof=true&sd=true

- pdf: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XhzDf73mmdeGTPnbxdDoicG6e2j1mrwZ/view?usp=drive_link

Summary

• Focus:

  • Understanding ecosystems and the roles animals play

  • Leverage sensor data from the animals themselves

  • Are assembling datasets of the flow of animal across the planet and various environmental data around these animals

• Internet of animals:

  • Animals can communicate with us using wearables

  • Have been placing wearable tags on animals since 1960’s, from bees to rhinos

  • 124 GPS points per sqkm

  • ~15000 animals feeding live data 

  • Animal Tracker app: public access to a subset of the data

  • Ocean tracking also available, difference hardware/communication challenges

• ICARUS system

  • Global satellite-based monitoring system

  • First: Antenna on the ISS

  • Currently developing: fleet of microsatellites

  • Tags are a few grams/centimeters, small enough for birds

    • Tracking local and migration patterns

    • Whole paths and intermediate stopping points

• What can we do?

  • Change weather/climate predictions

    • Sensors can be taken in many places, measure temperature, wind, gases, etc.

    • Can use the choices that animals make for travel, feeding, breeding to infer what must be going on with the climate (can detect complex patterns, need correlation analysis to leverage data)

  • Detect disease spread

    • Animal health affected by different diseases

    • Measure animal temperature, motion (e.g. ear shaking), etc.

    • Key for ecosystem health, food safety

  • Natural catastrophes

    • Animals are often sensitive to earthquakes, tsunami

    • E.g. Banda Aceh earthquake: fewer casualties in region where people knew how to interpret animals’ reactions to earthquakes

    • E.g. Monitoring goat motion on Mt Etna, observing that their paths are predictive of eruptions (more activity -> eruption soon)

    • E.g. Monitoring farm animal behavior around earthquakes in Apenine area, Italy: higher activity before earthquakes

    • Leverage local knowledge to choose species that are sensitive to different phenomena

  • Ecosystem protection

    • Goal: protect endangered animals from hunting or snares that target other species

    • Placing tags on animals to track position/acceleration to capture behavior

    • Can detect when animals are caught in traps

    • Can detect when and where animals are killed/hunted

    • Less effective at preventing poaching of game animals 

      • Hunters still hunt

      • More effective if placed on animals that are not hunted but respond to hunters (as opposed to tourists or rangers)

    • Tags can detect when cats start to hunt birds, can emit alarm sound to alert birds

• Financialization of conservation

  • Animals across the planet sequester 6 GTons CO2e

  • Many other economic and societal benefits of ecosystems

  • The “Interspecies Bank” concept

    • Pay money to people who protect an ecosystem as long as they’re effective

    • Need daily verification that an animal is ok

    • Umbrella animals (e.g. large mammals) are best at indicating the overall health of the ecosystem

    • Don’t need a full understanding of the ecosystem to coarsely track health from observations of the key species

  • Ecosystem services

    • Straw-colored fruit bats: plant billion trees every night by dropping seeds from the fruit they eat

    • Musk Ox climate service: graze bushes, reduce their dark albedo and keeps the ground temperature colder, thus keeping methane in permafrost

    • 
      

• MoveApps

  • Docker that puts together data analysis systems

  • Gets real-time alerts

• Sensors

  • IOT networks enable us to collect data from sensors

    • On land there are many networks (e.g. cell towers)

      • City: narrowband IOT

      • Country: 200km (can use SigFox)

      • Remote areas: satellite

      • Can put multiple comms chips on same device

    • Oceans are still very challenging to

  • Energy:

    • Batteries, capacitors

    • Energy harvesting

    • Solar panels

  • Ground vs space communication (different comms protocols)

  • Cost dropping to $20

  • Shrinking to few grams (1-18g)

  • Larger tags can host a solar panel, $100/tag for prototypes, target is $30-40

  • Commercial: Tractive tags for dogs/cats, 1.5 million tags (https://tractive.com/)

• Ways to apply tags

  • Guns that shoot nettles that stick to fur

  • Deer put their heads through hole to lick salt, get collared

  • In many cases, don’t need to capture animals

• Ecosystem analysis:

  • Digital for nature: bring many sensors into a single system

  • Camera traps, audio sensors, environmental DNA (scoop up samples from streams), individual animals

  • Mystery: 30% of North American songbirds have disappeared over the past few decades. Need to understand when, where and how an animal dies. Monitor target animals and who else is out there.