Study
Terrestrial animal tracking as an eye on life and planet
Kays, Roland; Crofoot, Margaret C.; Jetz, Walter; Wikelski, Martin
Science, 2015
Reviews the development of animal-borne tracking — from radio telemetry through GPS to accelerometers and multi-sensor tags — and what each generation of hardware made answerable.
- Studied in
- Animalia
- Sample size
- review of tracking technology and its findings
Tag mass, battery life and data recovery, rather than biology, have set the boundaries of what was knowable about animal movement, and each reduction in tag size opened a new class of species and question.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Movement ecology is technology-limited, and the field advances when the hardware does.
How NatureHQ reads it
Used to keep the method visible on the pages that quote tracks. It is also the source of the constraint NatureHQ repeats: a tag should be a small fraction of body mass, which is why the animals we know most about tend to be the large ones.
- A review of methods rather than a source for any particular animal’s route.
- Written in 2015; miniaturisation has continued since.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Published by: American Association for the Advancement of SciencePublished in Science or Science Advances (AAAS).
doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa2478
Checked against Crossref on 2026-09-28, and they agree on the title, the authors and the year.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-09-03.