The University of Western Ontario

Published purpose

Movement is fundamental to the lives of animals, and due to the seasonality at high latitudes a high proportion of Canada’s wildlife is migratory. Understanding the life cycles and threats to these animals requires detailed information about migratory routes and timing, as well as sources of mortality. The Motus Wildlife Tracking System is a ground-based network of receivers for tracking radio-tagged animals. ICARUS uses sophisticated Global Positioning System (GPS) and multisensory transmitters, but currently lacks a space-based platform to receive data from the transmitters. The Western Skylark CubeSat will provide space-based data collection for both Motus and ICARUS to give near real time capabilities to the data flow from these systems. This project will demonstrate the full potential of these two systems while collecting novel data on migratory songbirds, waterbirds, and shorebirds. A 3U CubeSat with both Motus and ICARUS transponders will act as a relay collecting data from remote Motus ground stations and retransmitting that data back to the ground station at Western University.