Terrestrial animal tracking as an eye on life and planet

This influential review synthesized how rapidly improving tracking technology, from GPS tags to accelerometers and global data repositories, had turned animal movement into a powerful sensor network for understanding ecology and global change. The authors argued that miniaturized, networked tags let researchers observe individual decisions, population processes, and even environmental conditions sampled by the animals themselves. They highlighted advances in tag size, battery life, and data transmission that were opening previously untrackable species and life stages to study. For felid science, the paper framed why carnivore tracking had moved from sparse VHF fixes to dense, sensor-rich trajectories. It remains a touchstone for the argument that movement data are central to twenty-first-century biology and conservation.