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Introducing online african lion GPS collar tracking

Category: Lion-watching | Date: Jul 05 2008 | By: Seamus

Have you ever thought of visiting africa? Have you pondered following an african lion? Would you like to learn more about the meeting of the tried and tested old style of tracking (tyre-tread sandals, a sword and sharp eyes) and the new tools of wildlife research (GPS collars linked to the internet via a satellite phone)?

I have good news for you. Today from the comfort of your armchair you can now visit a small part of maasailand via an online map and follow one of our study lions. This is thanks to a new lion-tracking website that our volunteer Mike has built for us. It accepts downloads from Ndelie’s GPS collar and translatesthe data into a google map API. Simply put, the website will show you where Ndelie the lion has been. Please visit the site, either from the link in this post, or by clicking on the icon in the sidebar. Mike and I would like to hear your thoughts / comments / ululations / condemnations. Also… please pass on the link to the tracking site if you think it looks interesting. And, well, perhaps there are some well-off folks out there who will pick up an envelope at the back of the church, if they like what they see.

This is mentioned on the site, but just to re-iterate: the data presented here is not real-time, mostly due to the fact that we have tried to optimise the power consumption of the collar (it takes a great deal of battery power to send the data through the satphone). You will see a delay of a few days sometimes. There is also the possibility that the collar will stop transmitting altogether for periods of time. Its extremely difficult to design housings for sensitive electronic equipment for lions, that can go the distance (so to speak). Thank you Robert and the team at Vectronic-aerospace for donating the collar, and Mike and Samira for volunteering weeks of their time to build the site.

This is not Ndelie, but if you click on this guy’s nose he will lead you to the tracking site…. enjoy!

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4 Responses to “Introducing online african lion GPS collar tracking”

sheryl, washington dc, on 05 Jul 2008

Pretty cool. The first thing I did was zoom in as far as possible to make sure this didn’t give the poachers any ideas. Nicely done. She sure covered some ground recently!

s.

Seamus, on 05 Jul 2008

Sheryl - there are far easier lions to poach than this one. Even with the aid of a sat colar and a VHF beacon he’s difficult to get to. I don’t know all that many poachers, but I think most of them don’t have internet access…

I hope we can give higher res maps at some stage in the future. This was the best we could do with the format.

Wim, on 06 Jul 2008

Damn that speaking dictionary link. I’d always thought that ululate was pronounced “Oolyoolate” but then I thought it was onomatopoeic, silly me. To think, all these years I’ve been getting it wrong in public and everyone’s been far too polite to tell me! The shame.
I’m liking this new map thing. Very nifty.
I’m surprised that his territory seems so small. Does it change with the seasons and are its limits by choice or in response to something? Furthermore, what happened on June 30th (at least I think it’s June 30th, I’m colour blind?)

Lion Guardians » New site tracks lion for us!, on 09 Jul 2008

[…] are very excited about a new website that has just been launched by the Kilimanjaro Lion Conservation Project, which shows exactly where one of our collared lions Ndelie has been in the previous few […]

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