Testing Global Positioning System performance for wildlife monitoring using mobile collars and known reference points

To determine the spatial resolution of Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver data, rigorous testing is essential. We tested performance of the Lotek 3300 GPS collar for medium-sized mammals (Lotek Engineering, Inc., Newmarket, ON, Canada). To mimic real wildlife monitoring situations, we performed both static (stationary receiver) and mobile tests, placing the receiver collar on a dog. We compared fix locations of the mobile receiver with the actual trajectory described by a portable Trimble high-precision GPS. We determined performance in relation to habitat type and leaf cover. Location error was habitat-dependent, with the best results in open habitat and much poorer ones in forest, particularly coniferous-dominated forest. For both static and mobile tests, location accuracy was higher when the number of satellites contacted was high and when the residual positional dilution of precision (PDOP) value was low. However, location error was highly variable, even for a given PDOP value and a given number of satellites contacted. Finally, mobile collars performed less well than their static counterparts, presumably because of frequent changes of GPS position and orientation.