I-Game NG - Integrated Telemetry and GIS System for Wildlife Management Next Generation

Wildlife monitoring provides valuable information for a wide range of socio-political, ecologic and economic issues. The important application areas are reduction of accidents with wildlife, planning of large infrastructure projects, lowering damage in forests, and wildlife biologic research. Current wildlife telemetry systems using bearing transmitters have the disadvantage to disturb the animals behavior and to be costly in terms of resources required. Newly developed systems based on GPS and GSM technology still have a relatively low data rate due to a restricted energy supply. Therefore, a telemetry system based on GPS and GSM technology is developed which allows a generally higher data rate due to additional energy generation on the animal. A camera mounted on the telemetry collar provides additional significant information on the animals behavior. In order to identify the location, residence time and movement patterns of animals and precisely analyze their habitat requirements, all essential spatial information (existing maps, results from satellite and aerial photo interpretation, GPS points, digital elevation model etc.) is integrated into a Geographical Information System. The GIS allows for automatic calculation of statistics on habitat use and visualization of integrated information.Major project outcome will be a concept for the production of small series of the telemetry collar for wildlife monitoring as well as one enhanced test-collar of the developed game telemetry solution based on satellite-navigation (GPS, Galileo), telecommunication and data transmission modules (GSM, WLAN, satellite), a camera and various sensor devices.