After more than 5 years of research, testing and prototyping, FRI and the University of Calgary reached a licensing agreement with Lotek Wireless Inc., to commercially develop The Animal Pathfinder. Lotek designs and manufactures fish and wildlife monitoring systems. The Animal Pathfinder is a new tracking device fitted not only with a GPS but also a digital camera. With funding support from TECTERRA, a national organization that enables Canadian companies to bring innovative geomatics solutions to market, Lotek is further developing this technology and anticipates releasing the product into the market in the spring of 2012.
It all started a few years ago when Gordon Stenhouse, FRI’s Grizzly Bear Program lead, attended an engineering conference. During a presentation by Naser Elsheiny, University of Calgary geomatics engineer, about attaching monitoring devices to automobiles to track movement and rates of speed, Stenhouse thought “I need that for our grizzly bear research”. This idea led to a meeting with Dr. Andrew Hunter and a team of engineers with the Schulich School of Engineering at the University of Calgary. So what happens when a wildlife biologist meets engineers? Well a high tech digital camera device for tracking wildlife is developed, that’s what!
Current methods in animal tracking provide accurate locations at a point in time. We can connect the dots to identify an animal’s travel patterns but still not understand how they interact with the environment. The Animal Pathfinder (aptly named by Stenhouses’ daughter Leah) addresses these shortcomings and provides not only the ability to track an animal’s travel patterns but also has the capability to analyze behavior based on an animal’s body movements, allowing the researcher to assess the animal’s behavior, such as feeding, diet via imagery, response to human activities, and habitat selection.
On November 22nd, 2012, Innovate Calgary, who helped bring the collar to market, organized a media event to showcase this innovative technology and the researchers behind it. This casual, come as you please, event provided members of the local media (television, print and radio) opportunity to have one-on-one time with Stenhouse and Hunter to learn more about this technology and how it can assist in gaining a comprehensive understanding of bears.
Prior to the media event, Innovate Calgary sent out a press release across the country resulting in national and international coverage.