Internet of Animals: How Wildlife Can Help Forecast Environmental Change

Technology & Climate: The Outer Space Frontier lecture and conversation - part of the Next Frontiers Symposium

The collective wisdom of the Earth's animals provides an immense bio-treasure of unprecedented information for humankind. Learning from animals in the "Internet of Animals" can help us predict natural catastrophes, forecast global zoonotic disease spreads, or safeguard food resources while monitoring in situ every corner of the planet. The evolved senses of animals as well as technical sensors on animal-borne tracking tags enable local earth observations at highest spatial and temporal resolution. To protect and understand the ecosystem services provided by animals, we need to monitor individual animals seamlessly on a global scale. At the same time, these unprecedented life-history data of individual wild animals provide deep, novel insight into fundamental biological processes.

The ICARUS initiative, an international bottom-up, science-driven technology development of small, cheap and autonomous IoT (Internet of Things) sensing devices for animal movement and behavior is aiming towards this: wearables for wildlife. The resulting big data available in the open-source data base Movebank helps understand, monitor, predict and protect life on our planet.

Featuring Prof. Dr. Martin Wikelski (Director of the Department of Migration of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and Honorary Professor at the University of Konstanz), et al.

This event is co-hosted by the German Center for Research and Innovation (DWIH) New York