Wireless Sensor Network for Wildlife Tracking and Behavior Classification of Animals in Doñana

• Published in: IEEE communications letters Vol. 20; no. 12; pp. 2534 - 2537
• Main Authors: Dominguez-Morales, J. P., Rios-Navarro, A., Dominguez-Morales, M., Tapiador-Morales, R., Gutierrez-Galan, D., Cascado-Caballero, D., Jimenez-Fernandez, A., Linares-Barranco, A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.12.2016; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Animals; Base stations; Behavior; Biomonitoring; Classification; distributed system; Endangered species; Global Positioning System; National parks; neural network; Neural networks; pattern recognition; Power consumption; Sensor network; Temperature sensors; Tracking; Wild animals; Wireless sensor networks
• ISSN: 1089-7798; 1558-2558
• DOI: 10.1109/LCOMM.2016.2612652

The study and monitoring of wildlife has always been a subject of great interest. Studying the behavior of wild animals is a difficult task due to the difficulties of tracking and classifying their actions. Nowadays, technology allows designing low-cost systems that make these tasks easier to carry out, and some of these systems produce good results; however, none of them obtains a high-accuracy classification because of the lack of information. Doñana National Park is a very rich environment with various endangered animal species. Thereby, this park requires a more accurate and efficient system of monitoring to act quickly against animal behaviors that may endanger certain species. In this letter, we propose a hierarchical, wireless sensor network installed in this park, to collect information about animals' behaviors using intelligent devices placed on them which contain a neural network implementation to classify their behavior based on sensory information. Once a behavior is detected, the network redirects this information to an external database for further treatment. This solution reduces power consumption and facilitates animals' behavior monitoring for biologists.