Research overview: duty cycling and adaptive sampling schedules

To stretch limited battery life, modern collars use duty cycling, turning sensors and the GPS receiver on only at chosen times, and adaptive schedules that intensify sampling when it matters most. This overview describes activity-triggered logging, in which an accelerometer wakes the GPS during movement, and seasonal or diel schedules that capture dawn and dusk hunting bouts at high resolution while sparing power during long daytime rests. Such strategies let researchers obtain dense data on the behaviors of interest without sacrificing deployment length. The overview considers how schedule choices shape the resulting trajectory and warn against comparing metrics across studies with mismatched cycles. Smart duty cycling is central to squeezing maximum biological insight from a finite energy budget.