Global positioning with animal-borne pressure sensors

Over the past decades, tracking technologies have become more ubiquitous and helped uncover crucial spatiotemporal relationships in nature. In order to apply these technologies to small animals and reduce any potential adverse impact of devices, geopositioning methodologies compatible with lightweight devices are highly sought after. Measured by lightweight geolocators, atmospheric pressure provides an untapped opportunity for global geopositioning, as its natural temporal variation is unique to each location.In this study, we estimate the position of birds by comparing pressure data recorded by the geolocator with reference data from a global weather reanalysis database. The method produces a likelihood map of the position based on (1) a mask of the locations for which the ground-level elevation matches the pressure measured by the geolocator and (2) a mismatch between the temporal time series measured by the geolocator and the reanalysis dataset. This new method is introduced step by step and applied to 16 tracks of nine long- and short-distance migrant species.Using known positions of double-tagged individuals (light and pressure data), we demonstrate that our method is almost three times more accurate than light-based positioning with an average error of 44 km in our trials. In contrast to the traditional light-based approach, pressure geolocation can provide useful information for short stationary periods (less than a day) and is not affected by the equinox problem nor by any shading effects due to weather or animal behaviour. To facilitate the application of the method, we developed an R package , together with a user guide and starting code .The use of pressure sensors to position animals has the potential to become widespread thanks to the combination of both affordable lightweight devices (< 0.4 g) and this method to estimate position of the device precisely and accurately. In particular, such devices can now be applied to short-distant migrants (> 100 km), forest-dwelling species, nocturnal animals and altitudinal migrants.

Automated summary

In the past decades, tracking technologies have become more widespread and have helped reveal important spatiotemporal relationships in nature. This study introduces a new method that uses atmospheric pressure data measured by lightweight geolocators to estimate the position of birds. The method is almost three times more accurate compared to light-based positioning and can provide useful information for short stationary periods and is not affected by certain limitations of traditional approaches.