Welcome To Encounternet
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The Encounternet Project
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| Encounternet is a project to design a network of long-life wireless transceiver tag devices that can be worn by small animals such as songbirds. Encounternet tags continuously monitor the social associations and movement patterns of individuals within a community or neighborhood of individuals. The system is modular and can be adapted for sensing, storing, and transmitting behavioral and physiological data. Devices will weigh approximately 1 gram and will consist of a small microprocessor, a digital radio transceiver, and a power supply. Devices can be additionally fitted with sensor technology such as a microphone, accelerometer, or a physiological recording amplifier circuit.
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| All hardware and software will eventually be open-source and freely available to anyone under the GNU licencing agreement. We are currently developing Encounternet and a key goal is that the system should be easy to use and available and affordable to as many researchers as possible.
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News
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Feb, 2010
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Encounternet was successfully deployed on song sparrows in Discovery Park, Seattle. This, our first field deployment, was a pilot test of the system and provided proof of the concept. For more about the deployment, visit the song sparrow test results page.
John Burt has been conducting range tests in an open field to characterize the relationship between signal strength values (i.e., RSSI - recorded with every tag ID pulse), and actual distance between tags and base stations. Knowing how to transform RSSI into a distance value allows us to estimate inter-tag distance during encounters, a to localize tags in space if three or more base stations receive a tag ID pulse.
The February edition of Popular Mechanics has an article about new animal tracking technologies that mentions the Encounternet project.
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Sept 15, 2009
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John Burt presented the Encounternet project at the MIT HEMBI conference.
Ewen Callaway wrote an article about the project for New Scientist
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June, 2009
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The Encounternet project was officially funded through the NSF Instrument Development for Biological Research (IDBR) program. Award info
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