Remington J. Moll

DEVELOPMENT OF AN ANIMAL-BORNE VIDEO AND ENVIRONMENTAL DATA COLLECTION SYSTEM FOR WHITE-TAILED DEER

Advisor: Josh Millspaugh

In the past 20 years, technological advances have produced dramatic changes in ecological investigations. Animal-borne video and environmental data collection systems (AVEDs) have emerged in recent years as an advanced form of biotelemetry that combines video with other animal-borne sensors (e.g., audio, GPS). AVEDs open numerous doors for fine-scale behavioral research, including investigations into animal interactions, contact rates, disease transmission and bioenergetics. AVEDs are also excellent tools for the study of difficult-to-capture behavioral events (e.g. reproduction, predation events, etc), especially for elusive species.

I am privileged to be part of a multi-disciplinary team that is developing an AVED to study white-tailed deer. Our team includes Dr. Zhihai He, an electrical engineering professor at MU, several of Dr. He’s graduate students, and Jeff Beringer and Joel Sartwell of MDC. Our goal is to create a long-lasting, energy-efficient system that is small enough so as to not affect the behavior of the test animals. In the future, we would like to use this system to study white-tailed deer disease transmission and road-crossing behavior.