Yale scientists say that increased tagging of fish, seals, birds, and other animals can help fill key data gaps in understanding the world’s changing climate.
The world’s scientists rely on an elaborate network of satellites, ocean buoys, weather stations, balloons, and other technologies to help predict the weather and assess the global effects of climate change on terrestrial landscapes, oceans, and the atmosphere.
But they are overlooking some of the most sensitive and informative instruments of all — the world’s animals — argue researchers at Yale’s Center for Biodiversity and Global Change (BGC Center) and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior.
Equipping fish, birds, seals, and other creatures with sophisticated sensors, can offer localized and timely data on environmental conditions impacted by climate change that current technology cannot.
We can literally turn animals into flying, swimming, and walking weather stations.
A study published in the journal Nature Climate Change describes the shortcomings of current methods of collecting weather and climate data — and the benefits of equipping animals with sensors. By tagging animals with such technologies, they say, scientists can improve their measurements of air temperature, ocean salinity, and air pollution as well as the animals’ own metabolism.
In doing so, the authors say, animals can help scientists fill critical data gaps, particularly in remote parts of the planet.
The authors identify several examples of how such an animal-based monitoring system might work. For instance, while satellites can record temperatures atop the canopy of a cloud-covered jungle they are not able to measure conditions on the ground. But a monkey equipped with modern GPS-tracking sensors can. In addition, the sensors can also monitor changes in the animal’s stress levels as a result of warming temperatures. And while most weather stations are built on flat landscapes and in developed areas of the world, they are seldom placed in remote mountain regions, including in areas that are among the world’s most affected by climate change. However, mountain goats or birds moving up and down steep mountainous terrains are able to characterize the temperature profile in great detail.
And over the Atlantic Ocean, sophisticated weather balloons offer pilots warnings of turbulence on their routes. But flying from Japan to Chile there is little to no such information available.
That is why the Japanese government has begun to equip high-flying seabirds with sensors to gauge windspeed strength at a variety of altitudes and integrates ocean measurements collected from technology-equipped turtles into oceanographic models for weather forecasts.
The Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior has already equipped thousands of birds and animals with sensors designed to track where wildlife is thriving — and where it is struggling — along migratory routes affected by climate change. While these sensors are designed to track biodiversity, they can also be used to help predict weather and the effects of extreme weather events such as heatwaves on animals.
There are other examples of how animal tagging is helping to provide a living measure on the impacts of climate change itself in near real time. For instance, tagged elephant seals already provide 80% of data on ice depth and ocean salinity in Antarctica, which is helping scientists predict sea level rise under current and future climate change.
And land animals equipped with sensors are not only able to report on under-sampled areas, they are able to do so at fine spatial detail.
News Source: Yale
