© Shane Sumasgutner

Methods

Biologging lets us (almost) see the world through an animal’s eyes. Tiny sensors carried by wildlife record where they go, how they move, and how they respond to changing landscapes - often in places and moments we could never observe ourselves. By turning individual movements into rich data on behaviour, energetics, and human–wildlife interactions, biologging reveals the hidden rules shaping life on a rapidly changing planet.

Camera Traps

Camera traps add eyes to biologging. They capture animals going about their lives without human presence, revealing behaviours, interactions, and rare moments that tags alone can’t show.

GPS

GPS is the backbone of biologging: It tells us where animals are and when they are there. From fine-scale movements to migrations spanning continents, GPS anchors all other sensor data in time and space, turning behaviour into movement, and movement into ecology.

ACC - Accelerometer

Sumasgutner_START Hearing 2022 v0614 handed in presentation.jpg

Accelerometers (ACC) bring biologging to life by revealing what animals are actually doing. Fine-scale body movements (combing posture and velocity) translate into behaviours like flying, resting, or feeding, and even into estimates of energy expenditure. By adding activity to the when and where from GPS, ACC uncovers the hidden costs of living in natural and human-dominated landscapes.

Individual Marking

Individual marking/ Bird banding is what turns biologging into life-history research. By knowing who carries a tag, we can link movement and behaviour to age, sex, experience, reproduction, and survival across years. This connection allows biologging data to be embedded in an individual’s life story - revealing not just how animals move, but how lives unfold in changing environments.

Ground Truthing Behaviour

Ground-truthing is essential for making sense of biologging data. By directly observing animals - or using complementary tools like camera traps - we can link sensor signals to real behaviours and contexts. This validation turns abstract data streams into biological meaning and ensures that patterns in movement, activity, and energetics truly reflect how animals live and interact with their environment.

Physiology

Laboratory and field-based physiological measurements - such as stress hormones, stable isotopes, or blood metabolites - allow us to interpret sensor data in terms of condition or energetics. By validating biologging signals against physiological responses, we can move from describing behaviour to understanding the mechanisms that shape survival and life histories.

Mortality Signals

Mortality signals emerge when multiple sensors speak together. A sudden stop in movement, flat-lined accelerometry, temperature changes, or altered GPS patterns ('mortality clusters') can jointly reveal where, when and how an animal dies. By integrating information across sensors, biologging allows us to distinguish true mortality from tag failure and to link death events to individual state, environmental conditions, or human pressures.

Conservation Dog

Our conservation detection dog plays an impossible-to-overlook role in our biologging work. “Nala” locates dropped tags and recovers carcasses, allowing us to connect movement data with individual life histories and reduce waste. Recovered tags can be reused, maximising the value of each device while lowering costs and environmental impact. Nala’s work also enables validation of mortality events, assessment of tag performance, and the ethical completion of biologging studies beyond remote data transmission.

Drone Monitoring

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs; drones) provide versatile and efficient tools for wildlife monitoring, ecological research, and conservation management. At the Sumasgutner Lab, we use drone-based technologies to complement traditional field methods and biologging approaches, allowing efficient data collection across large, complex, or otherwise difficult-to-access landscapes. Our applications include (1) nest, colony, and roost monitoring, (2) habitat assessment and land-use mapping, (3) behavioural observations and movement ecology studies, (4) drone-based VHF telemetry, and (5) thermal drone monitoring. These activities are supported through recent collaborations with Wildlife Drones and ROFlight.

Open Science

Open and reusable data extend individual lives beyond a study system. Well-documented and shared biologging data allow individual life histories to inform future research, conservation, and policy. By following open data practices, we maximise the value of every tagged animal and ensure that biologging generates lasting knowledge. Working with wildlife carries a deep responsibility: we respect every individual life and strive to minimise our impact. Making data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable is therefore not just good science - It is a core part of our ethical commitment.