Animals as sentinels of the environment

Abstract:

Rapid environmental change driven by climate warming and human caused land use change alters species movement and geographic distribution worldwide, with substantial implications for ecosystems and human well-being. Remote sensing information can support biodiversity assessments and monitoring at the global scale, but remains limited by the spatiotemporal detail of biodiversity data and the resulting level of biological relevance. Often, the combination of species occurrences and remote sensing fails to provide the required environmental specificity to allow uncovering the mechanisms driving species re-distributions.

Advances in animal tracking technologies offer up new opportunities for overcoming such limitations. Besides providing animal locations, additional on board sensors can provide fine scale measurements of essential climate variables such as temperature, thus turning wild animals into mobile weather sensors. This provides new opportunities for associating local microclimatic conditions with animal space use. This has been shown to improve model predictions of species distributions; an essential biodiversity variable that can serve as baseline for conservation efforts. Simultaneously, animal-collected environmental information can be combined with remote sensing imagery and traditional meteorological measurements to create detailed environmental datasets of value for weather forecasting.

We describe previous uses of animal-collected environmental information and highlight research priorities and current limitations looking forward. We exemplify our approach by providing an empirical example of integrating animal borne temperature measurements into terrestrial temperature forecasting. Tens of thousands of tagged animals worldwide could act as environmental sentinels – collecting both essential biodiversity and essential climate variables – increasing our ecological understanding of these animals and how to best protect them, coupled with opportunities for weather and ecological forecast abilities.