Autonomous Monitoring of Vulnerable Habitats

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Autonomous Monitoring of Vulnerable Habitats

• And other tales..

Robin Freeman, CEES, Microsoft Research 13 July
2007
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Overview

• Introduction
• Previous Work
• Analysing Avian Navigation
• Habitat Monitoring
• Brief Results
• Future Work

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Introduction

• About Me
• BSc CS-AI, MSc Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems,
  
• D.Phil (Engineering and Zoology)
• Part of the Life Sciences Interface Doctoral
  Training Centre, Oxford
• Trains physical and computation sciences
  graduates in biology before starting PhD in life
  sciences.
• Now a Post-Doc at Microsoft Research
• Computational Ecology and Biodiversity Science
  Group
• European Science Initiative, External Research
  Office.

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9hrs
15min
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Introduction

• Analysing Avian Navigation
• GPS Tracking of Pigeons, Oxford
• GPS Tracking of Manx Shearwaters, Skomer
• Habitat Monitoring
• Manx Shearwater
• Skomer Island, Wales

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Introduction

• Zoological Interest
• Specific questions (Sensory basis of navigation),
• Conservation (home range, behavioural anomalies),
• Other general questions.
• Technical Interest
• Novel algorithms/methods
• Analysis of positional information
• Feedback to bio-robotics, Complex Systems,
  Artificial Life, etc

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Pigeons? - Why Pigeons?

• Model Navigational Species
• Much easier to study than wild birds,
• Birds return to a maintained loft (Wytham).
• Allows attachment of GPS device
• Large body of research to draw on.
• Pigeon navigation has been studied for over 100
  years.

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How Do They Navigate?

• Two hypotheses for the sensory basis of
  navigation in the familiar area
• Map and Compass
• Compass controlled navigation (as it is at
  unfamiliar locations).
• Series of decision points using compass.
• Pilotage
• Independent of a compass, relying directly on
  visual cues
• Oh look, theres that house!

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Clock Shift

• Experiment
• Train the birds to recapitulate routes to home,
• Then clock-shift the birds by 90
• Sets up a direct competition between visual
  landmarks (the recapitulated route) and erroneous
  compass instructions

With D Biro, J Meade, T Guilford S J Roberts
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• Nearest Neighbour Analysis
• Shows offset and variance between controls and
  familiar clock-shift.

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Delayed Clock shift response (landmark related)
Tracks ranked by Mahalonobis distance from
recapping distribution
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• Demonstrates that both mechanisms must be
  involved.
• The birds must be able to home using visual
  information alone (they recapitulate)
• Consistent deviation from recapitulated path
• Offset? Zigzag?

Biro D, Freeman R, Meade J, S. Roberts, Guilford
T. (2007) PNAS. 104(18)
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Behavioural Segmentation
- Hidden-Markov Models - Positional Entropy
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Landscape Analysis

• More likely to fly over edge rich areas
• Flight pattern becomes less predictable over edge
  rich areas.

Lau KK, Roberts S, Biro D, Freeman R, Meade J,
Guilford T. (2006) J. Theo. Bio. 239(1) pp71-78
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Paired Homing Pigeon Flight

• GPS data for 48 Pigeons from 4 diff. sites
• All possible pairs considered
• Any real interaction between the birds should be
  seen as higher coupling between real pairs
• Other pairs may show
• High coupling due to same landscape/other unknown
  variables

Actual pair
Bird paired with self
Bird random bird from different site
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Birds which flew together show significantly (p lt
0.05) higher coupling than other possible
pairings. Implies some form of information
transfer.
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Manx Shearwater (Puffinus puffinus)

• Highly pelagic, migratory seabird.
• Burrow dwelling, central place forager.
• UK summer breeding
• Winters in South America
• 250, 000 300, 000 breeding pairs.
• 45 on three Pembrokeshire islands, Skomer,
  Skokholm and Middleholm
• 36 on Rum.

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Motivation

• Ecology and Behaviour very similar to other
  Procellariiformes
• Albatrosses, Petrels and Shearwaters.
• 19 of 21 Albatross Species now globally
  threatened
• Devastating impact of long-line fishing
• Understanding their behaviour, habitat and
  ecology may allow us to reduce this decline.

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Motivation
UK Seabird decline over recent years
Source JNCC, UK Seabirds 2005
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Skomer Island

• Small Island (2km long) off coast of Wales
• Home to large populations of Guillemots,
  Razorbills, Kittiwakes, Puffins, Fulmars
• Worlds largest population of Manx Shearwaters
• Well established research centre and study
  programmes

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Skomer Island
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Previous Work

• GPS Tracking of Manx Shearwater
• Distribution of foraging was largely unknown
• South to Spain
• Interaction
• With fisheries?
• Environmental variables?
• Establishment of Marine protection zones.

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• Foraging largely confined to Irish Sea
• Birds did not fly far south..
• Even when they had the opportunity to do so.
• Climate effect?
• Clustered areas
• Rafting.

Right Distribution of individual over trips of 1
to 7 days. Red shows incubating birds, blue chick
rearing
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• Each 2-hourly fix gives a small burst of 1Hz
  data.
• Bursts can be segmented into different
  behaviours.
• Speed Vs Directionality

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Sitting Erratic Movement
Directional Movement
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• Speed has no obvious effect on depth
• Time of day appears to (right)

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Autonomous Habitat Monitoring

• Working closely with Academic Partners
• University of Oxford
• Prof. Tim Guilford, Animal Behaviour
• Prof. Chris Perrins, Edward Grey Ornithology
  Institute
• University of Freie Berlin
• Tomasz Naumowicz, PHD, Free University Berlin
• Prof Torben Weis, U Duisburg-Essen

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Autonomous Habitat Monitoring

• Create and deploy a wireless sensor network that
  can
• Monitor the visitations of individual birds
• Monitor environmental conditions inside and
  outside the burrow
• Provide a pilot system for eventual integration
  with GPS tracking
• Do this all night, every night

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Methods

• Approx. 10 Burrow monitored
• Ringed and RFID tagged pair of birds in each
  burrow
• Sensors wireless sensor node to each burrow

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Methods

• Network
• ScatterWeb platform from Freie Universitat
  Berlin
• Nodes
• 2 x Passive Infrared
• 2 x Temp/Humidity
• RFID Detector

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Initial Results

• No observable impact on birds behaviour
• No evidence of digging, distress or abandonment.
• Of 10 monitored burrows
• 7 hatched (last week)
• Remainder still on eggs

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Initial Results

• Obvious nocturnal distribution of activity
• Bimodal?
• Resolution and density of data already
  significantly higher that achievable using
  traditional methods.

All recorded events
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2007/05/14 1200
2007/05/15 0000
2007/05/15 1200
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Initial Results
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0000

• Temperature Variation over 4 days (20-23 June)
• Red Temp Outside
• Green Temp Inside

0600
1800
1200
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Future Questions

• Do individuals return at specific times?
• How do pairs alternate feeding strategies?
• How does activity/environment vary across space
  and time?
• How do the results vary with weather?

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Future Directions

• Deploy second network
• Pilot has allowed us to iron out most problems
• Hope to set up additional network this winter.
• Create a toolkit that any ecologist can deploy
  and use.
• Integrate GPS tracking with network
• Continual monitoring of foraging behaviour.

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9hrs
15min
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An Aside (1)
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An Aside (2)