CAPE YORK’S feral pigs sound like an unusual target market for personal fitness monitoring devices.
But a trial of a new monitoring system offers potential to not just increase the effectiveness of control measures, but create new commercial opportunities as well.
A collaboration between researchers from CSIRO, James Cook University (JCU) and three Aboriginal organisations is developing a way to harness the new personal fitness technology and turn it into a solution for tracking and controlling feral pests across the country.
The project uses technology developed for Fitbits, wrist-worn digital pedometers with added tech such as GPS locators and accelerometers that monitor how, when and where you exercise.
CSIRO’s Townsville based Justin Perry and JCU’s Jeremy VanDerWal are taking technology that Townsville City Council has used to track the sometimes feral nightlife that wanders the town’s Strand nightclub strip.
Their new feral tracking system will be trialled on remote feral populations, that roam across a millions of hectares of remote, rugged country land managed by three aboriginal owned organisations representing traditional owners from Maningrida (Djelk) Aurukun, (Aak Puul Ngangtam) and Coen (Kalan Enterprises), ripping up native plants and waterways, and competing with native animals for food and habitat.
“We’re trialling it in the toughest environment we could find. If it works on the ferals up here, there’s nothing stopping us from using it on other wildlife anywhere else,” Dr Perry said.
The project received a monetary boost from last week’s $10 million funding package for pest animals and weeds control from the federal government.
The new kit includes sensors put together by the JCU team and tracking technology from CSIRO’s Data61. Thanks to the plummet in price of sensor technology in recent years, it is much cheaper than traditional GPS tracking collars, which cost between $2000 and $5000 each.
The prototypes being tested on Cape York and Arnhem Land come as a collar, which is strapped onto the buffalo or pig when it is caught, and then re-released to rejoin its mob. The team aim to get the tracking equipment down in size to fit on ear tags.
Dr Perry said the cost of tracking equipment has been a major challenge for effective pest control.
“Tracking programs are limited by the cost of the tracking collar, particularly if you have to pay for satellite downloads for the data. That means few members of the mob will be tracked, which limits understanding of how populations interact.
“This project will bring in a new generation of technology, set up the infrastructure that’s required and test it on a fine scale in partnerships with land managers, with continuous mapping of feral populations.”
Like many current technology-driven agricultural ventures, the project will tap into big data, which can be more accurately described as an organised pile of information comprised of myriad small measurements and readings.
In this case, data comes from sensors such as radio tags, GPS locators and weather monitors, which will be collated and form an internet of things (IoT) for feral monitoring.
“Like a Fitbit, our collars just use an accelerometer that tracks movement. It can detect if the animal is sleeping, how far and how fast it moves. It’s a measure of activity that we have never had before in these remote areas,” Prof. VanDerWal said.
The animals’ movements will be captured in tandem with a range of environmental measures, which can come cheaper than ever before. Weather stations to capture temperature, humidity, barometric pressure will be installed in the field at a cost of about $50 each.
“Linking the animals movement to weather will tell us when is the best time to control ferals. We will gain a picture of what weather they move around in, when they are dormant and where they go at different times," Dr Perry said.
The system uses LoRaWAN narrow band radio network, designed to run internet connected systems on low power over a long range.
The information from the collars and remote weather stations will be pinged by radio through to one a handful of base stations across the trial area, which can receive signal from upto 25 kilometre away.
The base stations will load the information to the internet, through nbn satellite , or a mobile network. If a base station cannot reach the internet, it will send the data to its neighbour until a connection to the internet is reached.
Cheaper units mean more can be deployed, to deliver a larger sample size of the mob for increased accuracy. The team is also developing analytics, to process and make use of the information from the field.
Coupled with climate data, the system offers tantalising potential to predict when are where mobs of ferals will turn up throughout the seasons.
“When we get funding for feral animal control, there is an assumption that people want to eradicate all the animals,” Dr Perry said.
“The traditional owners have different aspirations, In some areas there is a desire to protect the environment but they also have aspirations for economic development, which could mean herding buffalo for export.
“What we are talking about is providing information to people so they can make strategic decisions about the things they care about.”
“The current hunting method is not an ideal economic way to run business. You can’t guarantee supply for a start, and keeping animals in a state ready for sale is too costly, which is why these businesses struggle under the cost of regulations for food safety and so on.”
He said said the trial could deliver opportunities for commercial harvesting of feral pests.
“If you can know when and where the animals aggregate, you can target the location and open up opportunities to create a viable industry to control pests with commercial opportunities.”
The final piece of the puzzle is to make a system that is useful across the country, Prof. VanDerWal said.
“The technology is available now, and the method to analyse it is too. But no-one has brought the two together.
“We are tackling the back end, developing the hardware, data management and visualistion to deliver the ‘holy grail’.
“That is a plug and play system for any farmer to use. Just like I buy a computer and hook up to the internet, a farmer should be able to buy a mini sensor and attach it to an animal and use our system.”
