This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: When wildfire smoke fills the air, most people can go inside to avoid it. Wildlife does not have that option, and little is known about how animals living in remote areas respond to wildfires and smoke exposure.
Colorado State University researchers have developed an air quality monitoring device that can be paired with systems that track wildlife location and physiological data to learn how smoke affects wildlife health and behavior. The smoke logger is an open-source tool that will allow wildlife researchers everywhere to answer questions that previously couldn't be answered and gather data that can be used to better protect wildlife. The smoke logger design and programming are now freely available with publication of initial results in Methods in Ecology and Evolution.
"Wildfire is now a chronic problem in North America. We are all experiencing these massive smoke plumes that can negatively affect air quality for weeks at a time," said CSU professor George Wittemyer, who led the project with U.S. Forest Service wildlife ecologist Mark Ditmer and CSU postdoctoral researcher Adam Parlin.
"We're interested in how wildlife adjusts its behavior relative to smoke exposure, and it wasn't possible to know until now." As wildfires increase in frequency, size and severity, smoke plumes that affect air quality for an extended time are a new stressor for wildlife, Wittemyer added, and air quality typically is not monitored in wilderness areas. The small, affordable smoke logger the team has developed can be attached to animal-borne collars to record the concentration of hazardous particles animals are breathing. "We know relatively little about the impacts of wildfire smoke on the behavior of animals in the field, especially how free-roaming wildlife respond to severe smoke events," said Parlin, who designed the smoke logger while he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Conservation Biology.
"These units provide one avenue to better understand the consequences from wildlife's perspective—such as identifying refugia during smoke events—that can provide actionable insights for conservation and management." Wildlife studies—especially those that capture, collar and recapture animals—are resource-intensive, and many of them already track health data, like heart rate, in addition to GPS coordinates. These data combined with smoke logger data will reveal new information about wildlife welfare and activity. The team is partnering with researchers across the western U.S. to piggyback on studies tracking cougars, deer and elk, and they stationed sensors in the habitat of the endangered Sierra Nevada fisher, a small mammal related to weasels, to better understand the air quality in their range.
Those results will be published in future studies. They encourage researchers with projects where wildlife collars are recovered to partner with them to add smoke loggers to their sensor packages. Or, for about $100 in materials per unit, researchers can assemble their own smoke loggers by downloading the free, open-source design and programming.
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