News & Views
Welcome to Issue No. 6 of the International Bio-Logging Society Newsletter, bursting with exciting news, fresh ideas, and community highlights!
MoveBON: a new thematic BON on Animal Movement
GEO BON, the Biodiversity Observation Network initiative, has endorsed Move BON, a new thematic network dedicated to integrating animal movement data into biodiversity monitoring and conservation policy at national and global scales.
The IBioLS has contributed to this amazing result by participating in the preparatory meetings and is already directly involved in a range of the MoveBON activities, hosting the Data standard working group among others. See more here:
👉 GEO BON Announces Official Endorsement of Move BON
The new Bio-Logging Webinar series:
IBioLS & WildLABS joining forces for communication and beyond!
IBioLS and the Animal Movement group by WildLABS are joining forces to strengthen two-way communication and collaboration between our communities. Our focus is on keeping this community vibrant and connected!
We will host coffee chats and journal clubs three times a year, share resources, and create new opportunities for collaboration across platforms.
Reminder for the IBLS survey
All members should have received a link to our Questionnaire for an Inclusive and Participatory Society on June 25th. We have just sent reminders to those who have not yet had the chance to complete it. Please consider taking a few minutes to do so until November 10th — your participation will help us strengthen and better represent the bio-logging community globally.
In this Issue:
Bio-Logging Bulletin from our Correspondents
Highlights from the Gordon Research Conference on “Movement Ecology of Animals”
By Toshitaka Imaki
I attended the Movement Ecology of Animals – Gordon Research Conference, an international meeting held biennially that brings together researchers studying a wide range of species and employing diverse methodological approaches related to movement ecology. This year’s conference took place in California in August, attracting more than 150 scientists and graduate students from around the world.
A defining feature of this conference is its strict policy on limiting the public use of information presented in talks and discussions. This policy enables researchers to engage in open exchanges about unpublished work, making the conference a valuable opportunity to gain early insights into emerging trends in the field. What struck me most this year was the growing emphasis on using simulations to predict animal behaviour. I realised that such predictive approaches can provide critical guidance for conservation decision-making, which I found particularly inspiring.
During the poster session, I presented unpublished findings from my own research on the collective tracking of Adélie penguins. My motivation stems from a fundamental ecological curiosity — why do so many animals live together while others do not? Through my experience at the conference, I came to appreciate that, although such intellectual curiosity is indispensable in research, it should not lead us to overlook the importance of contributing to real-world solutions. I am now exploring ways to generalise my findings and translate them into quantitative predictions of animal behaviour — a direction that was largely inspired by the stimulating discussions I had with researchers from diverse disciplines.
The next conference is scheduled to take place in Italy in 2027, and I look forward to seeing how both my own research and global trends in movement ecology will have advanced by then.
By Allison Payne
Hello! My name is Allison Payne, and I’m a PhD candidate in the Beltran Lab, located at the University of California, Santa Cruz. For the past four years, I have worked with colleagues on prototyping and testing a custom acoustic recorder designed to sample the deep-ocean soundscape from the back of an elephant seal. The 192 kHz sampling rate is power hungry, but it allows us the unique opportunity to detect animals that produce high-frequency signals such as echolocating whales.
After years of trial and error, this past winter the Beltran lab was able to instrument an elephant seal named H391 with the recorder. On her 56-day, 800 km journey, she recorded over 700 hours of acoustic data off the coast of the western United States. The most exciting development was that she recorded dozens of hours of Pacific white-sided dolphins, sperm whales, Risso’s dolphins, orcas, and ships. We hope that this work will reveal new discoveries about interspecific interactions in deep sea environments. I was thrilled to present the early results from this work at the Gordon Research Conference on Movement Ecology in Ventura, CA in August 2025.
We are excited to deploy additional acoustic recorders on more elephant seals this coming winter. A huge thank you to our team of collaborators at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics. We also appreciate the elephant seal teams at the Beltran and Costa labs and the Beckman Foundation for making this exciting work possible!
Tales from the Wild: Bio-Loggers in Action
I hold a BSc and MSc in Biological Sciences and Biotechnology from Botswana International University of Science and Technology. My MSc focused on the bioecology of freshwater crustaceans, where I determined their preferred environmental conditions through repeated measures of the physicochemical properties of their environments and preferred thermal gradient in the lab.
My introduction to bio-loggers came after joining a project on rewilding captive elephants in the Okavango Delta, Botswana, where we used GPS collars with triaxial accelerometers from Vectronic Aerospace GmbH to study their transition back into the wild. This made life easier as it removed the need to frequently observe and record the whereabouts of the elephants.
Murphy Tladi
Natural Resources Management
PhD Student
Okavango Research Institute
University of Botswana
For this project, we fitted collars on both captive and wild elephants. Different sedation methods were used to ensure the safety and welfare of the elephants, making the collaring process as brief and stress-free as possible. The fieldwork involved tracking captive elephants that are in the release process using satellite imagery and VHF terminals to pinpoint their exact positions on the ground. This allowed us to collect data remotely via UHF terminals, making the process efficient and less intrusive.
The field observations of the activities of the elephants was used to calibrate the triaxial accelerometric data recorded by the collars. The final data from wild elephants was collected manually after removing the collars three years later. Analyzing this data revealed interesting differences in movement and activity patterns between wild and captive elephants. Over time, the movements and activities of the captive elephants slowly changed to mirror those of wild elephants. This insight is particularly valuable for understanding how captive elephants transition to the wild during rewilding projects. Our findings have provided a deeper understanding of elephant movements and activities, highlighting the potential of bio-loggers to simplify data collection in wildlife research.
Events & Opportunities
- Living Data 2025, October 21-24 2025, Bogotá, Colombia
- World Biodiversity Forum: June 14-19, 2026, Davos, Switzerland.
[Session] Harnessing Animal Movement for Biodiversity Monitoring: From Movement Trait Data to Biodiversity Indicators and Decision-Making.
Abstract submission deadline: November 18, 2025: Call for Abstracts
[Workshop] Integrating Animal Movement into the Essential Biodiversity Variable Framework
- British Ecological Society Annual Meeting, December 15-18 December, Edinburgh, UK
- 44th International Sea Turtle Society Symposium, February 28 – 06 March 2026, Kailua-Kona, Hawai’i
- Sharks International, May 4-8 2026, Colombo, Sri Lanka
- 12th International Penguin Conference, August 31 – 04 September 2026, 91-97 Thompson Ave, Cowes VIC 3922, Australia
- World Seabird Conference, September 7–11 2026, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
- 26th Biennial Conference of the Biology of Marine Mammals, October 19-23 2026, San Juan, Puerto Rico
- Save the date! – 9th International Bio-Logging Science Symposium (BLS9), October 18-22 2027, Seville, Spain
- Save the date! – 1st International Conservation Technology Conference, Lima 18-20 2026. IBioLS is involved in the Scientific Board. There will be innovative opportunities for showcasing the relevance of Biologging Science for conservation, from talks to workshops to linkage with industry. Don’t miss this! https://wildlabs.net/article/save-date-first-international-conservation-technology-conference
Special Issues
- Conservation Physiology special issue: “Insights and tools from biologging for conservation physiology”. Submission deadline: 30th November 2025
Publications
Since our last newsletter there have been 51 bio-logging papers published (based on a Web of Science search using the keywords “bio-telemetry” OR “biologging” OR “bio-logging” OR “biotelemetry” OR “animal-borne”).
These papers range from understanding the ecology of species to new tagging technology.
Here are some examples of the work going on in our community:
- The Seaward Migration of European Eel at a Continental Scale: A Europe-Wide Biotelemetry Meta-Analysis
- Wiggle and glide: fine-scale telemetry reveals unique diving strategies in benthic-foraging sea snakes
- Drone-based application of whale tags: A “tap-and-go” approach for scientific animal-borne investigations
- Using wild-animal tracking for detecting and managing disease outbreaks
Job Opportunities
Are you hiring or have a job to share? Write to us and we will post your job!
- Head of Research and Biomonitoring Nouabale-Ndoki National park, Congo
- Post Doctoral Researcher in Marine Mammal Ecology (D10/25.DR) — Scottish Association for Marine Science, Oban UK
- Postdoctoral position – Development of a digital twin for predicting the movement of marine animals, La Rochelle University, France
- Fisheries and Wildlife Biological Scientist, at Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), to aid the Imperiled Species Management Section’s Manatee Management Program
- COFUND PhD position – Zoology / Behavioural biology – Mechanisms of wild seal movements – a computational approach (SealMove), La Rochelle University, France, & University of Rostock (UROS), Germany.
- COFUND PhD position – Marine Ecology / Conservation – Disentangling the influence of natural and man-made threats on prey-predator interactions in coastal ecosystems, La Rochelle University, France, & Bangor University, UK.
Useful websites:
- AcademicsJobsOnline
- Euraxess
- Pacific Seabird Group Job Board (with links to other resources)
Stay tuned for the next Newsletter of the IBioLS in 3 months!
We are thrilled to have you as part of our community.
If you have any inquiry or want to be part of the next Newsletter, please do not hesitate to contact intl.biologging.society@gmail.com.
Don’t get lost, (bio)-log yourself in this diverse community!