IDBR: Type A. Photovoltaics allow ultra-miniaturized, long-life, wildlife tags

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

An award is made to Cornell University to fund a dramatic increase in the kinds and numbers of vertebrate species that can be tracked and monitored by the development of a new generation of lightweight yet highly functional tags. The work of the TABER (Technology for Animal Biology and Environmental Research) group at Cornell is like a real-life project team for engineering students. In the course of this project, the principal investigator and professional engineers will interact with at least a dozen engineering students, and they will interact with biologists and professional engineers in designing and producing devices that will be applied immediately to answer real-world questions about wildlife biology and conservation. This will give students a distinctive chance to have their design efforts make a difference outside Cornell. Because of the structure of the dissemination plan, the roll out of each new design is part of the research of collaborating scientists around the world, and this use has broader impacts in both basic and applied biology and ecology and "word of mouth" circulation among potential users and collaborators world-wide. A graduate student will be funded to make environmental sensors available to a very wide audience by producing multi-purpose boards to be distributed on Seeed Studio, along with instructional materials on sensor design and construction techniques. News of the project's progress will be passed whenever possible through a network of highly effective communication colleagues in the Colleges of Engineering and Agriculture and Life Sciences and the Education and Multimedia groups at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Through the development of a General-purpose Programmable Tag (GPT) and a Digital Turnstile Tag (DTT), this project will extend the limits of how small extremely long-lived tags can be. The GPT functions much like traditional beeper tags, with limited abilities to telemeter data, but small size (ca. 0.4 g) and a lifespan longer than that of most birds. Proposed improvements in tag design and antenna placement should dramatically decrease problems for birds wearing the tags, and the proposed information infrastructure that will follow the tags from programming to deployment should make the tag id data highly functional and reliable for all users. This tag has the potential to revolutionize the real-time monitoring of bird migration and the study of dispersal. The proposed DTT would decline to as little as 1 g in mass, and, though it will be optimized to collect solar geolocation data at first, the same platform could be used for an extremely broad array of sensing applications in an open-ended Lab-on-a-Bird platform. In its geolocation function, the DTT would leverage all the progress that has been made recently with geolocation loggers and extend dramatically the range of species to which the technology can be applied by removing the requirement for repeat capture for data recovery in a very small package.