Validating the use of intrinsic markers in body feathers to identify inter‑individual differences in non‑breeding areas of northern fulmars

Many wildlife studies use chemical analyses to explore spatio-temporal variation in diet, migratory patterns and contaminant exposure. Intrinsic markers are particularly valuable for studying non-breeding marine predators, when direct methods of investigation are rarely feasible. However, any inferences regarding foraging ecology are dependent upon the time scale over which tissues such as feathers are formed. In this study, we validate the use of body feathers for studying non-breeding foraging patterns in a pelagic seabird, the northern fulmar. Analysis of carcasses of successfully breeding adult fulmars indicated that body feathers moulted between September and March, whereas analyses of carcasses and activity patterns suggested that wing feather and tail feather moult occurred during more restricted periods (September to October and September to January, respectively). By randomly sampling relevant body feathers, average values for individual birds were shown to be consistent. We also integrated chemical analyses of body feather with geolocation tracking data to demonstrate that analyses of δ13C and δ15N values successfully assigned 88 % of birds to one of two broad wintering regions used by breeding adult fulmars from a Scottish study colony. These data provide strong support for the use of body feathers as a tool for exploring non-breeding foraging patterns and diet in wide-ranging, pelagic seabirds.

Taxonomy of fundamental concepts of localization in cyber-physical and sensor networks

Localization is a fundamental task in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), where data is tightly coupled with the environment and the location where it is generated. The research literature on localization has reached a critical mass, and several surveys have also emerged. This review paper contributes on the state-of-the-art with the proposal of a new and holistic taxonomy of the fundamental concepts of localization in CPS, based on a comprehensive analysis of previous research works and surveys. The main objective is to pave the way towards a deep understanding of the main localization techniques, and unify their descriptions. Furthermore, this review paper provides a complete overview on the most relevant localization and geolocation techniques. Also, we present the most important metrics for measuring the accuracy of localization approaches, which is meant to be the gap between the real location and its estimate. Finally, we present open issues and research challenges pertaining to localization. We believe that this review paper will represent an important and complete reference of localization techniques in CPS for researchers and practitioners and will provide them with an added value as compared to previous surveys.

Sistema localizador interior de baixo custo

Projeto para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática e de Computadores

Portal de Eventos

Na última década tem-se assistido ao aparecimento de várias redes sociais, no entanto, apesar de maior parte delas terem suporte para a promoção de eventos, estas não têm grandes funcionalidades úteis, relacionadas com o tema, como ferramentas de apoio aos promotores, procura de eventos baseados em geolocalização, integração com outros sistemas, gestão de entradas, bilheteiras… Nesta dissertação é documentado o desenvolvimento de um sistema que tem como objetivo colmatar esses problemas.

m-SportGIS

Information technologies (ITs), and sports resources and services aid the potential to transform governmental organizations, and play an important role in contributing to sustainable communities development, respectively. Spatial data is a crucial source to support sports planning and management. Low-cost mobile geospatial tools bring productive and accurate data collection, and their use combining a handy and customized graphical user interface (GUI) (forms, mapping, media support) is still in an early stage. Recognizing the benefits — efficiency, effectiveness, proximity to citizens — that Mozambican Minister of Youth and Sports (MJD) can achieve with information resulted from the employment of a low-cost data collection platform, this project presents the development of a mobile mapping application (app) — m-SportGIS — under Open Source (OS) technologies and a customized evolutionary software methodology. The app development embraced the combination of mobile web technologies and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) (e.g. Sencha Touch (ST), Apache Cordova, OpenLayers) to deploy a native-to-the-device (Android operating system) product, taking advantage of device’s capabilities (e.g. File system, Geolocation, Camera). In addition to an integrated Web Map Service (WMS), was created a local and customized Tile Map Service (TMS) to serve up cached data, regarding the IT infrastructures limitations in several Mozambican regions. m-SportGIS is currently being exploited by Mozambican Government staff to inventory all kind of sports facilities, which resulted and stored data feeds a WebGIS platform to manage Mozambican sports resources.

Creation of a web application for smart park system and parking prediction study for system integration

In the last few years, we have observed an exponential increasing of the information systems, and parking information is one more example of them. The needs of obtaining reliable and updated information of parking slots availability are very important in the goal of traffic reduction. Also parking slot prediction is a new topic that has already started to be applied. San Francisco in America and Santander in Spain are examples of such projects carried out to obtain this kind of information. The aim of this thesis is the study and evaluation of methodologies for parking slot prediction and the integration in a web application, where all kind of users will be able to know the current parking status and also future status according to parking model predictions. The source of the data is ancillary in this work but it needs to be understood anyway to understand the parking behaviour. Actually, there are many modelling techniques used for this purpose such as time series analysis, decision trees, neural networks and clustering. In this work, the author explains the best techniques at this work, analyzes the result and points out the advantages and disadvantages of each one. The model will learn the periodic and seasonal patterns of the parking status behaviour, and with this knowledge it can predict future status values given a date. The data used comes from the Smart Park Ontinyent and it is about parking occupancy status together with timestamps and it is stored in a database. After data acquisition, data analysis and pre-processing was needed for model implementations. The first test done was with the boosting ensemble classifier, employed over a set of decision trees, created with C5.0 algorithm from a set of training samples, to assign a prediction value to each object. In addition to the predictions, this work has got measurements error that indicates the reliability of the outcome predictions being correct. The second test was done using the function fitting seasonal exponential smoothing tbats model. Finally as the last test, it has been tried a model that is actually a combination of the previous two models, just to see the result of this combination. The results were quite good for all of them, having error averages of 6.2, 6.6 and 5.4 in vacancies predictions for the three models respectively. This means from a parking of 47 places a 10% average error in parking slot predictions. This result could be even better with longer data available. In order to make this kind of information visible and reachable from everyone having a device with internet connection, a web application was made for this purpose. Beside the data displaying, this application also offers different functions to improve the task of searching for parking. The new functions, apart from parking prediction, were: - Park distances from user location. It provides all the distances to user current location to the different parks in the city. - Geocoding. The service for matching a literal description or an address to a concrete location. - Geolocation. The service for positioning the user. - Parking list panel. This is not a service neither a function, is just a better visualization and better handling of the information.

Mobile Internet : perspectives from the Stakeholders

Mobile internet represents a major new trend in communication technologies use and consumption, but few evidence exists that confirms claims of novelty and social change in association with this technology use. This paper characterizes the use of mobile internet in a southern European country and associated patterns of use, focusing both on users’ profiles, forms of access, motivations to use and most popular activities undertaken via this technology, from a diffusion of innovations and social adoption of technologies perspectives, and tries to compare mobile it with fixed access to the internet in order to validate possible transformations that point to new social configurations. We seek to understand the way stakeholders perceive and characterize the European context of mobile internet. The depicted study involved a qualitative stage consisting of a set of interviews with mobile communications industry representatives and market research community in the country. These interviews were analysed in Nvivo, leading to the following eleven main categories that are explored throughout the paper: smartphones in Europe, mobile internet in Europe, users profiles, obstacles to the spread, forms of access, forms of use, motivations to use mobile internet, limitations of smartphones, apps, digital divide VS digital union and predictions for the future, as well as several subcategories forming a tree categorization. According to the data collected, mobile phones’ sales are decreasing in Europe and worldwide but on the other hand smartphones are having an exponential growth which leads to the democratization of internet access via mobile devices. As a consequence of this, it is believed that mobile internet access will soon exceed the fixed one. Mobile internet users are multiplatform, they exploit all the possibilities of mobility and they are spending less time on computers. The main obstacles to the spread of mobile internet are the high prices of price plans and there is still a lack of information and knowledge regarding the service. Mobile internet users are developing new online surfing behaviours based on apps and less in browsers and social networks represent a very high share of internet traffic through mobile phones. With mobility, “dead time” is turning into useful time and users are more likely to be available to try new services and analyze products. Innovative services concerning geolocation, consumerism, share and relationships are growing and it is necessary to highlight that mobile internet allows calling and texting, which can turn telecommunications companies into the role of Dump Pipes. This exploratory design raises questions in relation with mobile internet access and its social consequences, and provides interesting indicative research results relevant for future research in this area.

Hampered foraging and migratory performance in swans infected with low-pathogenic avian influenza A virus

It is increasingly acknowledged that migratory birds, notably waterfowl, play a critical role in the maintenance and spread of influenza A viruses. In order to elucidate the epidemiology of influenza A viruses in their natural hosts, a better understanding of the pathological effects in these hosts is required. Here we report on the feeding and migratory performance of wild migratory Bewick's swans (Cygnus columbianus bewickii Yarrell) naturally infected with low-pathogenic avian influenza (LPAI) A viruses of subtypes H6N2 and H6N8. Using information on geolocation data collected from Global Positioning Systems fitted to neck-collars, we show that infected swans experienced delayed migration, leaving their wintering site more than a month after uninfected animals. This was correlated with infected birds travelling shorter distances and fuelling and feeding at reduced rates. The data suggest that LPAI virus infections in wild migratory birds may have higher clinical and ecological impacts than previously recognised.

Web service to deliver filtered RSS items to a mobile application

In the past decade there has been massive growth of data on the internet. Many people rely on XML based RSS feeds to receive updates from websites. In this paper, we propose a method for managing the RSS feeds from various news websites. A web service is developed to deliver filtered news items from RSS feeds to a mobile client. Each news item is indexed, subsequently, the indexes are used for filtering news items. Indexing is done in two steps. First, classical text categorization algorithms are used to assign a category to each news item, second, geoparsing is used to assign geolocation data to each news item. An android application is developed to access filtered news items by consuming the proposed web service. A prototype is implemented using Rapid miner 5.0 as the data mining tool and SVM as the classification algorithm. Geoparsing and geocoding web services, and Android API are used to implement location-based access to news items. Experimental results prove that the proposed approach is effective and saves a significant amount of information overload processing time.

GeoLight - processing and analysing light-based geolocator data in R

1. Determining global position by light measurements (‘geolocation’) has revolutionised the methods used to track migratory birds throughout their annual cycle.2. To date, there is no standard way of analysing geolocator data, making communication of analyses cumbersome and hampering the reproducibility of results.3. We have, therefore, developed the R package GeoLight, which provides basic functions for all steps of determining global positioning and a new approach in analysing movement pattern.4. Here, we briefly introduce and discuss the major functions of this package using example movement data of European hoopoe (Upupa epops).

Link between vertical and horizontal movement patterns of cod in the North Sea

We used a geolocation method based on tidal amplitude and water depth to assess the horizontal movements of 14 cod Gadus morhua equipped with time-depth recorders (TDR) in the North Sea and English Channel. Tracks ranged from 40 to 468 d and showed horizontal movements of up to 455 km and periods of continuous localised residence of up to 360 d. Cod spent time both in midwater (43% of total time) and near the seabed (57% of total time). A variety of common vertical movement patterns were seen within periods of both residence and directed horizontal movement. Hence particular patterns of vertical movement could not unequivocally define periods of migration or localised residence. After long horizontal movements, cod tended to adopt resident behaviour for several months and then return to broadly the same location where they were tagged, indicating a geospatial instinct. The results suggest that residence and homing behaviour are important features of Atlantic cod behaviour.

Measurement error causes scale-dependent threshold erosion of biological signals in animal movement data

Recent advances in telemetry technology have created a wealth of tracking data available for many animal species moving over spatial scales from tens of meters to tens of thousands of kilometers. Increasingly, such data sets are being used for quantitative movement analyses aimed at extracting fundamental biological signals such as optimal searching behavior and scale-dependent foraging decisions. We show here that the location error inherent in various tracking technologies reduces the ability to detect patterns of behavior within movements. Our analyses endeavored to set out a series of initial ground rules for ecologists to help ensure that sampling noise is not misinterpreted as a real biological signal. We simulated animal movement tracks using specialized random walks known as Lévy flights at three spatial scales of investigation: 100-km, 10-km, and 1-km maximum daily step lengths. The locations generated in the simulations were then blurred using known error distributions associated with commonly applied tracking methods: the Global Positioning System (GPS), Argos polar-orbiting satellites, and light-level geolocation. Deviations from the idealized Lévy flight pattern were assessed for each track after incrementing levels of location error were applied at each spatial scale, with additional assessments of the effect of error on scale-dependent movement patterns measured using fractal mean dimension and first-passage time (FPT) analyses. The accuracy of parameter estimation (Lévy μ, fractal mean D, and variance in FPT) declined precipitously at threshold errors relative to each spatial scale. At 100-km maximum daily step lengths, error standard deviations of ≥10 km seriously eroded the biological patterns evident in the simulated tracks, with analogous thresholds at the 10-km and 1-km scales (error SD ≥ 1.3 km and 0.07 km, respectively). Temporal subsampling of the simulated tracks maintained some elements of the biological signals depending on error level and spatial scale. Failure to account for large errors relative to the scale of movement can produce substantial biases in the interpretation of movement patterns. This study provides researchers with a framework for understanding the limitations of their data and identifies how temporal subsampling can help to reduce the influence of spatial error on their conclusions.

The accuracy of Fastloc-GPS locations and implications for animal tracking

Over recent years, a major breakthrough in marine animal tracking has occurred with the advent of Fastloc-GPS that provides highly accurate location data even for animals that only surface briefly such as sea turtles, marine mammals and penguins. We assessed the accuracy of Fastloc-GPS locations using fixed trials of tags in which >45 000 locations were obtained. Procedures for determining the speed of travel and heading were developed by simulating tracks and then adding Fastloc-GPS location errors. The levels of detail achievable for speed and heading estimates were illustrated by using empirical Fastloc-GPS data for a green turtle (Chelonia mydas, Linnaeus, 1758) travelling over 3000 km across the Indian Ocean. The accuracy of Fastloc-GPS locations varied as a function of the number of GPS satellites used in the location calculation. For example, when Fastloc-GPS locations were calculated using 4 GPS satellites, 50% of locations were within 36 m and 95% within 724 m of the true position. These values improved to 18 and 70 m, respectively, when 6 satellites were used. Simulations indicated that for animals travelling around 2·5 km h-1 (e.g. turtles, penguins and seals) and depending on the number of satellites used in the location calculation, robust speed and heading estimates would usually be obtained for locations only 1-6 h apart. Fastloc-GPS accuracy is several orders of magnitude better that conventional Argos tracking or light-based geolocation and consequently will allow new insights into small-scale movement patterns of marine animals.

Breeding short-tailed shearwaters buffer local environmental variability in south-eastern Australia by foraging in Antarctic waters

BACKGROUND: Establishing patterns of movements of free-ranging animals in marine ecosystems is crucial for a better understanding of their feeding ecology, life history traits and conservation. As central place foragers, the habitat use of nesting seabirds is heavily influenced by the resources available within their foraging range. We tested the prediction that during years with lower resource availability, short-tailed shearwaters (Puffinus tenuirostris) provisioning chicks should increase their foraging effort, by extending their foraging range and/or duration, both when foraging in neritic (short trips) and distant oceanic waters (long trips). Using both GPS and geolocation data-loggers, at-sea movements and habitat use were investigated over three breeding seasons (2012-14) at two colonies in southeastern Australia. RESULTS: Most individuals performed daily short foraging trips over the study period and inter-annual variations observed in foraging parameters where mainly due to few individuals from Griffith Island, performing 2-day trips in 2014. When performing long foraging trips, this study showed that individuals from both colonies exploited similar zones in the Southern Ocean. The results of this study suggest that individuals could increase their foraging range while exploiting distant feeding zones, which could indicate that short-tailed shearwaters forage in Antarctic waters not only to maintain their body condition but may also do so to buffer against local environmental stochasticity. Lower breeding performances were associated with longer foraging trips to distant oceanic waters in 2013 and 2014 indicating they could mediate reductions in food availability around the breeding colonies by extending their foraging range in the Southern Ocean. CONCLUSIONS: This study highlights the importance of foraging flexibility as a fundamental aspect of life history in coastal/pelagic marine central place foragers living in highly variable environments and how these foraging strategies are use to buffer this variability.