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Collars
While GPS collars have successfully been used in open grasslands and boreal forests they do not work well in dense tropical rainforests. A test with a regular GPS collars at Los Amigos had a success rate of less than 1%.
The GPS collars we used incorporated a new GPS system called TrackTag, developed by
NAVSYS. The TrackTag is a small, lightweight GPS unit which records raw signal data that is later post-processed. This approach has two main advantages: the performance under dense canopy is enhanced and battery consumption is reduced. The receiver is capable of recording up to 30,000 positions. Results from the first few collars we retrieved showed, that the GPS successfully recorded an average of 40 positions per day (success rate 38-58%) under the dense rainforest canopy, giving us detailed information on the location and movement of the tapirs. The collars contained a timed drop-off mechanism that allowed us to retrieve the collar at a predefined date to download the data.
The first collars were custom built by Advanced Telemetry Systems based on their regular GPS collar with the GPS unit replaced by a TrackTag GPS. A second generation of collars house the TrackTag in a small enclosure that is attached to a regular VHF collar.