Validating ATLAS: A regional-scale high-throughput tracking system

Christine E. Beardsworth; Evy Gobbens; Frank van Maarseveen; Bas Denissen; Anne Dekinga; Ran Nathan; Sivan Toledo; Allert I. Bijleveld

doi:10.1111/2041-210X.13913

Validating ATLAS: A regional-scale high-throughput tracking system

Christine E. Beardsworth^*, Evy Gobbens, Frank van Maarseveen, Bas Denissen, Anne Dekinga, Ran Nathan, Sivan Toledo, Allert I. Bijleveld

^*Corresponding author for this work

Department of Ecology, Evolution & Behavior (EEB)

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

Fine-scale tracking of animal movement is important to understand the proximate mechanisms of animal behaviour. The reverse-GPS system—ATLAS—uses inexpensive (~€25), lightweight (<1 g) and low-power (~0.4 mJ/transmission) tags. Six systems are now operational worldwide and have successfully tracked over 50 species in various landscape types. The growing use of ATLAS to track animal movement motivates further refinement of best-practice application and an assessment of its accuracy. Here, we test the accuracy and precision of the largest ATLAS system, located in the Dutch Wadden Sea, using concurrent GPS measurements as a reference. This large-scale ATLAS system consists of 26 receivers and covers 1,326 km² of intertidal region, with almost no physical obstacles for radio signals, providing a useful baseline for other systems. We compared ATLAS and GPS location estimates for a route (mobile test) and 16 fixed locations (stationary test) on the Griend mudflat. Precision was estimated using standard deviation during the stationary tests. We also give examples of tracked red knots Calidris canutus islandica to illustrate the use of the system in tracking small shorebirds (~120 g). ATLAS-derived location estimates differed from GPS by a median of 4.2 m (stationary test) and 5.7 m (mobile test). Signals that were collected by more receiver stations were more accurate, although even three-receiver localisations were comparable with GPS localisations (~10 m difference). Receivers that detected 90% of the 1 Hz transmissions from our test tag were within 5 km of their furthest detection but height of both receiver and tag seemed to influence detection distance. The test tag (1 Hz) had a fix rate of >90% at 15 of 16 stationary sites. Tags on birds (1/6 Hz) on the Griend mudflat had a mean fix rate of 51%, yielding an average sampling rate of 0.085 Hz. Fix rates were higher in more central parts of the receiver array. ATLAS provides accurate, regional-scale tracking with which hundreds of relatively small-bodied species can be tracked simultaneously for long periods of time. Future ATLAS users should consider the height of receivers, their spatial arrangement, density and the movement modes of their study species (e.g. ground-dwelling or flying).

Original language	American English
Pages (from-to)	1990-2004
Number of pages	15
Journal	Methods in Ecology and Evolution
Volume	13
Issue number	9
Early online date	1 Jul 2022
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13913
State	E-pub ahead of print - 1 Jul 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work was partly funded by the Dutch Research Council grant VI.Veni.192.051 awarded to AIB. We are grateful to the Minerva Center for Movement Ecology for funding ATLAS development and implementation and to the core Israeli ATLAS team (Yotam Orchan, Yoav Bartan, Oren Kishon, Adi Weller‐Weiser, Ingo Schiffner, Anat Levi and Sivan Margalit) and its main practitioners (Motti Charter, David Shohami, Yosef Kiat, Emmanuel Lourie, Nadav Ganot, Aya Goldshtein and Rea Shaish) for their valuable help in developing ATLAS. Many people and organisations are involved in hosting the ATLAS equipment to complete this study, without whom it would be impossible. We would therefore like to thank the following: Hoogheemraadschap Hollands Noorderkwartier, Koninklijke Nederlandse Redding Maatschappij, Staatsbosbeheer, Marine Eco Analytics, Koninklijke Luchtmacht, Het Posthuys, Natuurmonumenten, Wetterskip Fryslan, Afsluitdijk Wadden Center, Vermilion, Rijkswaterstaat, Carl Zuhorn, Lenze Hofstee and Lydia de Loos. We would also like to thank the RV Navicula and RV Stern staff and volunteers for facilitating the work around Griend and Anita Koolhaas, Hinke and Cornelis Dekinga and Job ten Horn for their help with building the receiver stations. We are grateful to Pratik Gupte who had a key role in developing the residence patch method that we use to determine when birds are grounded. We thank Selin Ersoy, who proofread the manuscript and gave constructive feedback. Finally, we thank Joah Madden and Luca Borger, whose constructive conversations and comments on Christine E. Beardsworth's PhD thesis inspired the writing of this manuscript.

Funding Information:
This work was partly funded by the Dutch Research Council grant VI.Veni.192.051 awarded to AIB. We are grateful to the Minerva Center for Movement Ecology for funding ATLAS development and implementation and to the core Israeli ATLAS team (Yotam Orchan, Yoav Bartan, Oren Kishon, Adi Weller-Weiser, Ingo Schiffner, Anat Levi and Sivan Margalit) and its main practitioners (Motti Charter, David Shohami, Yosef Kiat, Emmanuel Lourie, Nadav Ganot, Aya Goldshtein and Rea Shaish) for their valuable help in developing ATLAS. Many people and organisations are involved in hosting the ATLAS equipment to complete this study, without whom it would be impossible. We would therefore like to thank the following: Hoogheemraadschap Hollands Noorderkwartier, Koninklijke Nederlandse Redding Maatschappij, Staatsbosbeheer, Marine Eco Analytics, Koninklijke Luchtmacht, Het Posthuys, Natuurmonumenten, Wetterskip Fryslan, Afsluitdijk Wadden Center, Vermilion, Rijkswaterstaat, Carl Zuhorn, Lenze Hofstee and Lydia de Loos. We would also like to thank the RV Navicula and RV Stern staff and volunteers for facilitating the work around Griend and Anita Koolhaas, Hinke and Cornelis Dekinga and Job ten Horn for their help with building the receiver stations. We are grateful to Pratik Gupte who had a key role in developing the residence patch method that we use to determine when birds are grounded. We thank Selin Ersoy, who proofread the manuscript and gave constructive feedback. Finally, we thank Joah Madden and Luca Borger, whose constructive conversations and comments on Christine E. Beardsworth's PhD thesis inspired the writing of this manuscript.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors. Methods in Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society.

Keywords

ATLAS
accuracy
animal tracking
movement ecology
positioning error
radio tags
reverse-GPS
telemetry

Access to Document

10.1111/2041-210X.13913

Cite this

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title = "Validating ATLAS: A regional-scale high-throughput tracking system",

abstract = "Fine-scale tracking of animal movement is important to understand the proximate mechanisms of animal behaviour. The reverse-GPS system—ATLAS—uses inexpensive (~€25), lightweight (<1 g) and low-power (~0.4 mJ/transmission) tags. Six systems are now operational worldwide and have successfully tracked over 50 species in various landscape types. The growing use of ATLAS to track animal movement motivates further refinement of best-practice application and an assessment of its accuracy. Here, we test the accuracy and precision of the largest ATLAS system, located in the Dutch Wadden Sea, using concurrent GPS measurements as a reference. This large-scale ATLAS system consists of 26 receivers and covers 1,326 km2 of intertidal region, with almost no physical obstacles for radio signals, providing a useful baseline for other systems. We compared ATLAS and GPS location estimates for a route (mobile test) and 16 fixed locations (stationary test) on the Griend mudflat. Precision was estimated using standard deviation during the stationary tests. We also give examples of tracked red knots Calidris canutus islandica to illustrate the use of the system in tracking small shorebirds (~120 g). ATLAS-derived location estimates differed from GPS by a median of 4.2 m (stationary test) and 5.7 m (mobile test). Signals that were collected by more receiver stations were more accurate, although even three-receiver localisations were comparable with GPS localisations (~10 m difference). Receivers that detected 90% of the 1 Hz transmissions from our test tag were within 5 km of their furthest detection but height of both receiver and tag seemed to influence detection distance. The test tag (1 Hz) had a fix rate of >90% at 15 of 16 stationary sites. Tags on birds (1/6 Hz) on the Griend mudflat had a mean fix rate of 51%, yielding an average sampling rate of 0.085 Hz. Fix rates were higher in more central parts of the receiver array. ATLAS provides accurate, regional-scale tracking with which hundreds of relatively small-bodied species can be tracked simultaneously for long periods of time. Future ATLAS users should consider the height of receivers, their spatial arrangement, density and the movement modes of their study species (e.g. ground-dwelling or flying).",

keywords = "ATLAS, accuracy, animal tracking, movement ecology, positioning error, radio tags, reverse-GPS, telemetry",

author = "Beardsworth, {Christine E.} and Evy Gobbens and {van Maarseveen}, Frank and Bas Denissen and Anne Dekinga and Ran Nathan and Sivan Toledo and Bijleveld, {Allert I.}",

note = "Funding Information: This work was partly funded by the Dutch Research Council grant VI.Veni.192.051 awarded to AIB. We are grateful to the Minerva Center for Movement Ecology for funding ATLAS development and implementation and to the core Israeli ATLAS team (Yotam Orchan, Yoav Bartan, Oren Kishon, Adi Weller‐Weiser, Ingo Schiffner, Anat Levi and Sivan Margalit) and its main practitioners (Motti Charter, David Shohami, Yosef Kiat, Emmanuel Lourie, Nadav Ganot, Aya Goldshtein and Rea Shaish) for their valuable help in developing ATLAS. Many people and organisations are involved in hosting the ATLAS equipment to complete this study, without whom it would be impossible. We would therefore like to thank the following: Hoogheemraadschap Hollands Noorderkwartier, Koninklijke Nederlandse Redding Maatschappij, Staatsbosbeheer, Marine Eco Analytics, Koninklijke Luchtmacht, Het Posthuys, Natuurmonumenten, Wetterskip Fryslan, Afsluitdijk Wadden Center, Vermilion, Rijkswaterstaat, Carl Zuhorn, Lenze Hofstee and Lydia de Loos. We would also like to thank the RV Navicula and RV Stern staff and volunteers for facilitating the work around Griend and Anita Koolhaas, Hinke and Cornelis Dekinga and Job ten Horn for their help with building the receiver stations. We are grateful to Pratik Gupte who had a key role in developing the residence patch method that we use to determine when birds are grounded. We thank Selin Ersoy, who proofread the manuscript and gave constructive feedback. Finally, we thank Joah Madden and Luca Borger, whose constructive conversations and comments on Christine E. Beardsworth's PhD thesis inspired the writing of this manuscript. Funding Information: This work was partly funded by the Dutch Research Council grant VI.Veni.192.051 awarded to AIB. We are grateful to the Minerva Center for Movement Ecology for funding ATLAS development and implementation and to the core Israeli ATLAS team (Yotam Orchan, Yoav Bartan, Oren Kishon, Adi Weller-Weiser, Ingo Schiffner, Anat Levi and Sivan Margalit) and its main practitioners (Motti Charter, David Shohami, Yosef Kiat, Emmanuel Lourie, Nadav Ganot, Aya Goldshtein and Rea Shaish) for their valuable help in developing ATLAS. Many people and organisations are involved in hosting the ATLAS equipment to complete this study, without whom it would be impossible. We would therefore like to thank the following: Hoogheemraadschap Hollands Noorderkwartier, Koninklijke Nederlandse Redding Maatschappij, Staatsbosbeheer, Marine Eco Analytics, Koninklijke Luchtmacht, Het Posthuys, Natuurmonumenten, Wetterskip Fryslan, Afsluitdijk Wadden Center, Vermilion, Rijkswaterstaat, Carl Zuhorn, Lenze Hofstee and Lydia de Loos. We would also like to thank the RV Navicula and RV Stern staff and volunteers for facilitating the work around Griend and Anita Koolhaas, Hinke and Cornelis Dekinga and Job ten Horn for their help with building the receiver stations. We are grateful to Pratik Gupte who had a key role in developing the residence patch method that we use to determine when birds are grounded. We thank Selin Ersoy, who proofread the manuscript and gave constructive feedback. Finally, we thank Joah Madden and Luca Borger, whose constructive conversations and comments on Christine E. Beardsworth's PhD thesis inspired the writing of this manuscript. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2022 The Authors. Methods in Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society.",

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doi = "10.1111/2041-210X.13913",

language = "American English",

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issn = "2041-210X",

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T1 - Validating ATLAS

T2 - A regional-scale high-throughput tracking system

AU - Beardsworth, Christine E.

AU - Gobbens, Evy

AU - van Maarseveen, Frank

AU - Denissen, Bas

AU - Dekinga, Anne

AU - Nathan, Ran

AU - Toledo, Sivan

AU - Bijleveld, Allert I.

N1 - Funding Information: This work was partly funded by the Dutch Research Council grant VI.Veni.192.051 awarded to AIB. We are grateful to the Minerva Center for Movement Ecology for funding ATLAS development and implementation and to the core Israeli ATLAS team (Yotam Orchan, Yoav Bartan, Oren Kishon, Adi Weller‐Weiser, Ingo Schiffner, Anat Levi and Sivan Margalit) and its main practitioners (Motti Charter, David Shohami, Yosef Kiat, Emmanuel Lourie, Nadav Ganot, Aya Goldshtein and Rea Shaish) for their valuable help in developing ATLAS. Many people and organisations are involved in hosting the ATLAS equipment to complete this study, without whom it would be impossible. We would therefore like to thank the following: Hoogheemraadschap Hollands Noorderkwartier, Koninklijke Nederlandse Redding Maatschappij, Staatsbosbeheer, Marine Eco Analytics, Koninklijke Luchtmacht, Het Posthuys, Natuurmonumenten, Wetterskip Fryslan, Afsluitdijk Wadden Center, Vermilion, Rijkswaterstaat, Carl Zuhorn, Lenze Hofstee and Lydia de Loos. We would also like to thank the RV Navicula and RV Stern staff and volunteers for facilitating the work around Griend and Anita Koolhaas, Hinke and Cornelis Dekinga and Job ten Horn for their help with building the receiver stations. We are grateful to Pratik Gupte who had a key role in developing the residence patch method that we use to determine when birds are grounded. We thank Selin Ersoy, who proofread the manuscript and gave constructive feedback. Finally, we thank Joah Madden and Luca Borger, whose constructive conversations and comments on Christine E. Beardsworth's PhD thesis inspired the writing of this manuscript. Funding Information: This work was partly funded by the Dutch Research Council grant VI.Veni.192.051 awarded to AIB. We are grateful to the Minerva Center for Movement Ecology for funding ATLAS development and implementation and to the core Israeli ATLAS team (Yotam Orchan, Yoav Bartan, Oren Kishon, Adi Weller-Weiser, Ingo Schiffner, Anat Levi and Sivan Margalit) and its main practitioners (Motti Charter, David Shohami, Yosef Kiat, Emmanuel Lourie, Nadav Ganot, Aya Goldshtein and Rea Shaish) for their valuable help in developing ATLAS. Many people and organisations are involved in hosting the ATLAS equipment to complete this study, without whom it would be impossible. We would therefore like to thank the following: Hoogheemraadschap Hollands Noorderkwartier, Koninklijke Nederlandse Redding Maatschappij, Staatsbosbeheer, Marine Eco Analytics, Koninklijke Luchtmacht, Het Posthuys, Natuurmonumenten, Wetterskip Fryslan, Afsluitdijk Wadden Center, Vermilion, Rijkswaterstaat, Carl Zuhorn, Lenze Hofstee and Lydia de Loos. We would also like to thank the RV Navicula and RV Stern staff and volunteers for facilitating the work around Griend and Anita Koolhaas, Hinke and Cornelis Dekinga and Job ten Horn for their help with building the receiver stations. We are grateful to Pratik Gupte who had a key role in developing the residence patch method that we use to determine when birds are grounded. We thank Selin Ersoy, who proofread the manuscript and gave constructive feedback. Finally, we thank Joah Madden and Luca Borger, whose constructive conversations and comments on Christine E. Beardsworth's PhD thesis inspired the writing of this manuscript. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 The Authors. Methods in Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society.

PY - 2022/7/1

Y1 - 2022/7/1

N2 - Fine-scale tracking of animal movement is important to understand the proximate mechanisms of animal behaviour. The reverse-GPS system—ATLAS—uses inexpensive (~€25), lightweight (<1 g) and low-power (~0.4 mJ/transmission) tags. Six systems are now operational worldwide and have successfully tracked over 50 species in various landscape types. The growing use of ATLAS to track animal movement motivates further refinement of best-practice application and an assessment of its accuracy. Here, we test the accuracy and precision of the largest ATLAS system, located in the Dutch Wadden Sea, using concurrent GPS measurements as a reference. This large-scale ATLAS system consists of 26 receivers and covers 1,326 km2 of intertidal region, with almost no physical obstacles for radio signals, providing a useful baseline for other systems. We compared ATLAS and GPS location estimates for a route (mobile test) and 16 fixed locations (stationary test) on the Griend mudflat. Precision was estimated using standard deviation during the stationary tests. We also give examples of tracked red knots Calidris canutus islandica to illustrate the use of the system in tracking small shorebirds (~120 g). ATLAS-derived location estimates differed from GPS by a median of 4.2 m (stationary test) and 5.7 m (mobile test). Signals that were collected by more receiver stations were more accurate, although even three-receiver localisations were comparable with GPS localisations (~10 m difference). Receivers that detected 90% of the 1 Hz transmissions from our test tag were within 5 km of their furthest detection but height of both receiver and tag seemed to influence detection distance. The test tag (1 Hz) had a fix rate of >90% at 15 of 16 stationary sites. Tags on birds (1/6 Hz) on the Griend mudflat had a mean fix rate of 51%, yielding an average sampling rate of 0.085 Hz. Fix rates were higher in more central parts of the receiver array. ATLAS provides accurate, regional-scale tracking with which hundreds of relatively small-bodied species can be tracked simultaneously for long periods of time. Future ATLAS users should consider the height of receivers, their spatial arrangement, density and the movement modes of their study species (e.g. ground-dwelling or flying).

AB - Fine-scale tracking of animal movement is important to understand the proximate mechanisms of animal behaviour. The reverse-GPS system—ATLAS—uses inexpensive (~€25), lightweight (<1 g) and low-power (~0.4 mJ/transmission) tags. Six systems are now operational worldwide and have successfully tracked over 50 species in various landscape types. The growing use of ATLAS to track animal movement motivates further refinement of best-practice application and an assessment of its accuracy. Here, we test the accuracy and precision of the largest ATLAS system, located in the Dutch Wadden Sea, using concurrent GPS measurements as a reference. This large-scale ATLAS system consists of 26 receivers and covers 1,326 km2 of intertidal region, with almost no physical obstacles for radio signals, providing a useful baseline for other systems. We compared ATLAS and GPS location estimates for a route (mobile test) and 16 fixed locations (stationary test) on the Griend mudflat. Precision was estimated using standard deviation during the stationary tests. We also give examples of tracked red knots Calidris canutus islandica to illustrate the use of the system in tracking small shorebirds (~120 g). ATLAS-derived location estimates differed from GPS by a median of 4.2 m (stationary test) and 5.7 m (mobile test). Signals that were collected by more receiver stations were more accurate, although even three-receiver localisations were comparable with GPS localisations (~10 m difference). Receivers that detected 90% of the 1 Hz transmissions from our test tag were within 5 km of their furthest detection but height of both receiver and tag seemed to influence detection distance. The test tag (1 Hz) had a fix rate of >90% at 15 of 16 stationary sites. Tags on birds (1/6 Hz) on the Griend mudflat had a mean fix rate of 51%, yielding an average sampling rate of 0.085 Hz. Fix rates were higher in more central parts of the receiver array. ATLAS provides accurate, regional-scale tracking with which hundreds of relatively small-bodied species can be tracked simultaneously for long periods of time. Future ATLAS users should consider the height of receivers, their spatial arrangement, density and the movement modes of their study species (e.g. ground-dwelling or flying).

KW - ATLAS

KW - accuracy

KW - animal tracking

KW - movement ecology

KW - positioning error

KW - radio tags

KW - reverse-GPS

KW - telemetry

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Validating ATLAS: A regional-scale high-throughput tracking system

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