Caribou Drone Study Finds 'Enormous Variation' Within Herd

Phys.org reports on the first paper to use drones to record the movement of animals within groups. "Andrew Berdahl of the Santa Fe Institute, his long-time collaborator Colin Torney of the University of Glasgow, and their co-authors used drones to collect overhead footage of caribou migrating to and from mainland Canada and Victoria Island. Then they extracted trajectories of each individual caribou and used those trajectories to quantify how social influence impacts fine-scale movement patterns within the herd. 'New technologies, like the drones and computer vision we used in our study, are really exciting because they give us the ability to collect movement data on every single individual in a group simultaneously,' says Berdahl. 'That means we can now unravel the important role that social interactions play in guiding migratory movements.'"

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The article in its entirety can be read here.