NIOC Meeting at Belfast Lough RSPB - WoW - 4th January at 730pm

Presented by Catherine Jardine of Birds Canada.

£1 to NIOC members, £3 non-members.

The Motus Wildlife Tracking System (motus.org) is a collaborative global network using automated radio telemetry to track small flying organisms (birds, bats, and insects). Motus answers fundamental research questions underpinning conservation, animal movement and behaviour, from local to global scales.

The Motus system has four unique characteristics:

1. lightweight tracking devices can be safely fitted to the smallest birds, bats and larger insects;

2. it enables high resolution tracking in time and space;

3. the infrastructure, technology and data are affordable and accessible; and

4. individual contributions are magnified through a diverse, networked community of people working cooperatively toward shared science and conservation objectives.

Motus uses digitally-coded radio tags that emit signals on a single frequency, detectable at ranges of up to 20km by an open-source network of receiving stations, unlike traditional VHF radio telemetry, where tags emit pulses on different frequencies. This enables thousands of animals of hundreds of species to be tracked simultaneously. Irrespective of where an animal has been tagged, be it northern Europe or southern Chile, all data are processed centrally and returned to the user. Participants in the network set up receivers and deploy registered tags for their own purposes, and in doing so leverage the time and effort of other users, with mutually reciprocal benefits. Join Catherine Jardine from the Birds Canada Motus team to learn more about the Motus Wildlife Tracking System, the current state of the network in Europe and examples of how Motus optimizes scarce research and conservation funds to answer conservation and research questions.