Accelearting Electronic Tag Development for Tracking Free-Ranging Marine Animals at Sea; Rept. for 1 Oct 2003-30 Sep 2004

摘要

The Tagging of Pacific Pelagics (TOPP) program is pioneering the application of bio-logging science to study pelagic habitat use by marine vertebrates in the North Pacific. The objectives of this proposal are to complete the development and testing of archival and satellite tags necessary for TOPP to reach its long-term goals of multi-species tagging in the North Pacific. Efforts center on both the improvement and testing of existing electronic tag technologies and on the development of new tools that will allow us to address more complex questions about the animals and their environment. Electronic tags are used both to describe the movements and behaviors of marine vertebrates and to collect oceanographic data for inclusion into the growing global databases. To maximize the value of the oceanographic data collected by the tags we are working to test and improve the quality of existing temperature, pressure, light sensors standard on most instruments. In addition, we are developing new tags including improved geolocation tags using the Global Positioning System (GPS) and tags that measure of salinity and chlorophyll a. The overriding objective is that the data collected is of equal precision and quality of that obtained from standard oceanographic sensors. TOPP is also developing data management techniques, and computational code for near-real time tracking.