Functionally connecting collaring and conservation to create more actionable telemetry research

Abstract

While telemetry technology has undoubtedly revolutionized ecological research, the impacts to conservation remain in question. Conservation is, after all, an applied discipline with research that is intentionally designed to inform policies and practices that can demonstrably protect biodiversity. Though telemetry is a tool that is commonly used to raise conservation funding, the technology itself cannot generate these policies and practices. Rather, it is the outputs of the analytical processes interrogating the data deriving from telemetry systems that can do so. This distinction is not semantic but rather fundamental to creating more actionable research. We developed conceptual frameworks to delineate the pathways by which telemetry research can be structured to inform conservation policies, practices, and the decisions of funders motivated to support conservation. We demonstrate how the application of these frameworks can reduce the research-implementation gap so as to make biodiversity conservation more effective. While our assessment uses collaring as a case study, our conceptual frameworks are applicable to all research using animal-borne technology seeking to promote the recovery of species of conservation concern.