RFID Rainforest

Not Just for Retailers, RFID Helps Track Rainforest Wildlife

Genevieve Rajewski 06.28.07 | 2:00 AM

The official WWF huangana, or peccary, team poses with peccaries Vivian and Jane, who have just been outfitted with collars and RFID ear tags.
Photo: WWF / AREAS Project

The same technology used to track pigs headed for your breakfast table may soon help their wild cousins in the Amazon.

As part of a five-year study of biodiversity in the Amazon, the World Wildlife Fund recently began using radio-frequency identification, or RFID, transponders to track white-lipped peccaries -- tusked pig-like animals weighing 100 pounds or more.

Every few days, peccaries descend on natural salt and mineral deposits called collpas to chow down on clay that aids in digestion and supplements their mineral-deficient diet. For the study, WWF researchers are tagging peccaries from different herds with RFID transponders. Four RFID readers in strategic points around the site passively register data on the tagged animals' visits for WWF staff to download later.

Although white-lipped peccaries are not endangered, they travel far and in large numbers, with as many as 400 animals in a single herd. Because of this, says George Powell, senior conservation scientist at the WWF, it's important to understand their habitat needs now, before rain forests in southeastern Peru and neighboring Bolivia and Brazil are cleared for logging, cattle or soy farming.

Now common in many supply chains, RFID tags help track apparel, shipping containers and cattle, and have been used in field research to trail wild salmon and even individual trees.

In the past, wildlife researchers were limited to costlier, labor-intensive means of tracking wildlife, such as very-high-frequency or GPS collars. But cost and convenience are making RFID tags an attractive alternative for some types of field studies. "VHF costs at least $300 per animal, and GPS systems cost about $3,000 each," says Powell. "Ear tags are a few cents a piece, so you can put out hundreds of them."

Also, with VHS and GPS tracking technologies, researchers have to drive or fly over a huge area -- or depend on a satellite -- to pick up a signal from tagged animals. And the signals can be obscured by the rainforest's canopy. Because peccaries take a predictable path to their pit stop, researchers can install readers on that path and then sit back and let the transmitters come to them.

The RFID tags' small size also allows the WWF to study young animals as they grow.

"You can' t put a collar around the neck of an animal that's going to grow. You'll choke it to death," says Powell. "Now, you can put RFID ear tags on little peccaries and see how long it takes them to grow up and if they survive. "

The World Wildlife Fund plans to use the information gathered in the peccary study, in conjunction with non-RFID research on jaguars, pumas and several parrots, to determine how large a protected area these wide-ranging species need to survive in the Amazon. The animal-protection group hopes such objective data will help it build international consensus on land management.

"A lot of times people say they are going to establish a park there, but do they know what they need in order to make it functional? " says Powell. "Look at Yellowstone National Park, one of our country's biggest. It was created without (this kind of) information, and it's not big enough to maintain grizzly bears -- an animal that is very important to the Yellowstone ecosystem. "

source : wired.com