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Cattle Tracker
Big Animal Tracker
Professor Jim Sprinkle from the University of Idaho contacted GCDC to help his research in monitoring cattle grazing behavior. At the time, two separate loggers were used to collect motion data and GPS location. We proposed combining these two data sets into one convenient data logger solution. Thus was born the Big Animal Tracker (BAT), which is based on our x16-GPS logger. The logger, GPS antenna, and battery pack were enclosed within a watertight 1-1/14 inch PVC coupler.
Features
- x16 3-axis 16g accelerometer (ADXL345)
- Programmable GPS location data. The user can configure the GPS to wake up at timed intervals to collect location data.
- High-gain amplified GPS antenna
- Time stamps are synchronized to GPS time
- GPS and accelerometer data are collected together in one file
Further Resources
The initial research based on our HAM-x16 logger was published in the journal Rangeland Ecology & Management in May 2021.
Predicting Cattle Grazing Behavior on Rangeland using Accelerometers
The x16-GPS results were presented by Prof Sprinkle at a joint meeting of the Canadian and American Society of Animal Science in Calgary in July 2024.
Read about the BAT deployed on two cows in southern Mississippi. Our talented intern developed an R script to analyze the GPS and accelerometer data to create a summary of activity overlay in Google Earth.