Wireless Sensor Network for Wildlife Tracking and Behavior Classification of Animals in Doñana

Abstract

The study and monitoring of wildlife has always been a subject of great interest. Studying the behavior of wild animals is a difficult task due to the difficulties of tracking and classifying their actions. Nowadays, technology allows designing low-cost systems that make these tasks easier to carry out, and some of these systems produce good results; however, none of them obtains a high-accuracy classification because of the lack of information. Doñana National Park is a very rich environment with various endangered animal species. Thereby, this park requires a more accurate and efficient system of monitoring to act quickly against animal behaviors that may endanger certain species. In this letter, we propose a hierarchical, wireless sensor network installed in this park, to collect information about animals’ behaviors using intelligent devices placed on them which contain a neural network implementation to classify their behavior based on sensory information. Once a behavior is detected, the network redirects this information to an external database for further treatment. This solution reduces power consumption and facilitates animals’ behavior monitoring for biologists.