Positioning aquatic animals with acoustic transmitters

17 pages, 3 tables, 1 figure.-- This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License

Geolocating aquatic animals with acoustic tags has been ongoing for decades, relying on the detection of acoustic signals at multiple receivers with known positions to calculate a 2D or 3D position, and ultimately recreate the path of an aquatic animal from detections at fixed stations. This method of underwater geolocation is evolving with new software and hardware options available to help investigators design studies and calculate positions using solvers based predominantly on time-difference-of-arrival and time-of-arrival. We provide an overview of the considerations necessary to implement positioning in aquatic acoustic telemetry studies, including how to design arrays of receivers, test performance, synchronize receiver clocks and calculate positions from the detection data. We additionally present some common positioning algorithms, including both the free open-source solvers and the ‘black-box’ methods provided by some manufacturers for calculating positions. This paper is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of methods and considerations for designing and implementing better positioning studies that will support users, and encourage further knowledge advances in aquatic systems

We acknowledge support from the project "Multi-lake research of fish ecology and management using high-resolution 3D telemetry systems", funded by ALTER-NET within the MultiSite Research Initiative. This work is supported by The European Aquatic Animal Tracking Network COST-Action (CA18102)—a project supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) as part of the Horizon Europe program, ALTER-NET (Through the Lake Fish Telemetry Workshop), The Danish Rod and Net Licence Funds, and the EU Horizon 2020 Project STRAITS (grant no. 101094649). Lennox and Cooke are members of Ocean Tracking Network, supported by the Canada Foundation for Innovation. Vollset, Nilsen and Dahlmo were supported by the Norwegian Research Council (projects LaKES 320726 and LOST 325840). Reubens acknowledges support by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) as part of the Belgian contribution to LifeWatch. The contribution by Arlinghaus was made possible through a grant from the European Maritime Fisheries Fund and the State of MV (Grant/Award numbers MV-I.18-LM-004 and B730117000069; BODDENHECHT). Contribution by Baktoft was made possible through Poul Due Jensens Fond. Contribution by Gjelland was supported by the Norwegian Research Council (project Hydrocen) and NINA internal funding)

Peer reviewed