Voltaire wrote "With great power comes responsibility", a quote which can easily be applied to scientists nowadays whose work effectively shapes the life of billions of living beings, operating through various disciplines from medicine through to ecology. To help scientists working with wild creatures, animal-attached electronic devices, commonly referred to as 'tags', have become indispensable tools, pushing the boundaries into the unimaginable enabling, for instance, information to be sent from animals into space and back via satellites. This 'great power' does indeed come with 'responsibility' however, as evidence piles up of the deleterious effects of tags on their animal carriers. The aim of this doctoral project is to provide scientists with an analytical framework within which to examine the effects of external tags on wild animals with a view to providing guidelines informing best practise in animal tagging. For that purpose, an integrative, multidisciplinary approach was undertaken which, from a theoretical to an experimental level, assessed the impact of tags on birds. With a main focus on marine birds, the results show that tag effects ranged from behavioural aberrations to compromised energetics, ultimately reducing both flying and swimming performance. This impact varied as a function of tag size, mass, shape, position and attachment, as well as being dependent on bird morphology and lifestyle. The length of time to which a bird is exposed to deleterious tag effects appears critical since these effects can snowball over time. Fortunately, and as reported in this thesis, there are simple rules which can be implemented to help minimise tag impact even for long-term studies, mainly through an optimised tag design and innovative attachment system. So, happily, this thesis shows that by careful thinking, we can benefit maximally from our 'great power' and thus ensure that our 'responsibilities' to wild animals are best informed.

Wildlife tracking is an essential task to gain better understanding of the migration pattern and use of space of the wildlife. Advances in computer technology and global positioning systems (GPS) have lowered costs, reduced processing time, and improved accuracy for tracking wild animals. In this thesis, a wildlife tracking extension is developed for ArcGIS 9.x, which allows biologists and ecologists to effectively track, visualize and analyze the movement patterns of wild animals. The extension has four major components: (1) data import; (2) tracking; (3) spatial and temporal analysis; and (4) data export. Compared with existing software tools for wildlife tracking, the major features of the extension include: (1) wildlife tracking capabilities using a dynamic data layer supported by a file geodatabase with 1 TB storage limit; (2) spatial clustering of wildlife locations; (3) lacunarity analysis of one-dimensional individual animal trajectories and two-dimensional animal locations for better understanding of animal movement patterns; and (4) herds evolvement modeling and graphic representation. The application of the extension is demonstrated using simulated data, test data collected by a GPS collar, and a real dataset collected by ARGOS satellite telemetry for albatrosses in the Pacific Ocean.

This research address the problem of inferring, through Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tracking data, the graph structures underlying social interactions in a group of rhesus macaques (a species of monkey). These social interactions are considered as independent affiliative and dominative components and are characterized by a variety of visual and auditory displays and gestures. Social structure in a group is an important indicator of its members’ relative level of access to resources and has interesting implications for an individual’s health. Automatic inference of the social structure in an animal group enables a number of important capabilities, including: 1. A verifiable measure of how the social structure is affected by an intervention such as a change in the environment, or the introduction of another animal, and 2. A potentially significant reduction in person hours normally used for assessing these changes. The behaviors of interest in the context of this research are those definable using the macaques’ spatial (x,y,z) position and motion inside an enclosure. Periods of time spent in close proximity with other group members are considered to be events of passive interaction and are used in the calculation of an Affiliation Matrix. This represents the strength of undirected interaction or tie-strength between individual animals. Dominance is a directed relation that is quantified using a heuristic for the detection of withdrawal and displacement behaviors. The results of an analysis based on these approaches for a group of 6 male monkeys that were tracked over a period of 60 days at the Yerkes Primate Research Center are presented in this Thesis.