Automated Wildlife Radio Tracking

Radio direction‐finding techniques have been widely employed by the wildlife tracking community because they offer powerful, flexible tools for monitoring animal movements and behavior. This chapter focuses on the application of this technology to monitor animal movements. Electronic tags offer the possibility of monitoring animals in their native habitat with minimal disturbance. Two satellite‐based systems are widely used for wildlife tracking: global positioning system (GPS) and Argos. These two systems provide location information using different techniques. The chapter addresses some practical design considerations when implementing a matched filter. It discusses the performance of a matched filter when the received carrier frequency differs from the expected value. The chapter addresses the computational requirements of the detector algorithm and provides methods to reduce them. It also describes the problems caused by the asynchronous arrival of tag transmissions, and invokes the time‐shifting property of the Fourier transform to efficiently handle the issue.