**Tracking Wildlife from Space**

by Patrick Barry

It\'s 10 o\'clock, and do you know where your Oriental Honey Buzzard is?

Tracking the whereabouts of birds and other migrating wildlife across
thousands of miles of land, air, and sea is no easy feat. Yet to protect
the habitats of endangered species, scientists need to know where these
roving animals go during their seasonal travels.

Rather than chasing these animals around the globe, a growing number of
scientists are leveraging the bird\'s-eye view of orbiting satellites to
easily monitor animals\' movements anywhere in the world.

The system piggybacks on weather satellites called Polar Operational
Environmental Satellites, which are operated by the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), as well as a European satellite
called MetOp. Sensors aboard these satellites pick up signals beamed
from portable transmitters on the Earth\'s surface, 850 kilometers
below. NOAA began the project---called Argos---in cooperation with NASA
and the French space agency (CNES) in 1974. At that time, scientists
placed these transmitters primarily on buoys and balloons to study the
oceans and atmosphere. As electronics shrank and new satellites\'
sensors became more sensitive, the transmitters became small and light
enough by the 1990s that scientists could mount them safely on animals.
Yes, even on birds like the Oriental Honey Buzzard.

"Scientists just never had the capability of doing this before," says
Christopher O\'Connors, Program Manager for Argos at NOAA.

Today, transmitters weigh as little as 1/20th of a pound and require a
fraction of a watt of power. The satellites can detect these feeble
signals in part because the transmitters broadcast at frequencies
between 401 and 403 MHz, a part of the spectrum reserved for
environmental uses. That way there\'s very little interference from
other sources of radio noise.

"Argos is being used more and more for animal tracking," O'Connors says.
More than 17,000 transmitters are currently being tracked by Argos, and
almost 4,000 of them are on wildlife. "The animal research has been the
most interesting area in terms of innovative science."

For example, researchers in Japan used Argos to track endangered
Grey-faced Buzzards and Oriental Honey Buzzards for thousands of
kilometers along the birds\' migrations through Japan and Southeast
Asia. Scientists have also mapped the movements of loggerhead sea
turtles off the west coast of Africa. Other studies have documented
migrations of wood storks, Malaysian elephants, porcupine caribou, right
whales, and walruses, to name a few.

Argos data is available online at www.argos-system.org, so every
evening, scientists can check the whereabouts of all their herds,
schools, and flocks. Kids can learn about some of these endangered
species and play a memory game with them at
spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/poes_tracking.

*This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California
Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration.*

![](media/image1.jpeg){width="5.333333333333333in" height="6.25in"}

Caption:

*The ARGOS program tracks the whereabouts of endangered migrating
animals via miniature transmitters on the animals and the POES
satellites in orbit.*

Note to editors:

*This image may be downloaded at
http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/news_images/argos_tracking.jpg.*