Home > Highlights > A different Arkansas Team featured on ESPN
If you hear the words “ESPN” and “ University of Arkansas” together, you probably immediately have a mental image of our Razorback football, basketball or track teams. But this time the ESPN report (http://espn.go.com/outdoors/conservation/s/c_fea_ducks_high-tech_study_wire.html ) involves a team of geospatial researchers from the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies. They’ve assisted in the creation of a high tech system to visualize receiver-tagged mallard ducks as they migrate seasonally between Arkansas and Canada. CAST has been working with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission (AGFC) to create an on-line mapping system that automatically depicts the travels of some 50 mallard ducks on the AGFC website (www.agfc.com). Biologists from the Game and Fish Commission have placed small (less than 30grams) telemetry-based transmitters on the backs of the ducks. At intervals between three to four days the transmitters send positional information for four hours to orbiting NOAA satellites which then rebroadcast the data back to earth. The system provides much needed biological data for AGFC researchers but the question was how they could make this information available to everyone interested in waterfowl migration.
In the summer of 2004, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and the research staff of the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies joined forces to design and develop a prototype mapping system that processes the NOAA satellite location data and automates the production user-defined reference maps of individual migration routes and current mallard locations that’s distributed in real-time via the internet. The result is the web mapping applications available from the front page of the AGFC website (www.agfc.com). Look for the “Satellite Mallard Tracking” link near the top of the AGFC opening page.
The initial project was designed to develop key biological research information that would be provided by transforming the positional fixes into information on the duck’s habitat usage and migration behaviors. While the system is meeting these research needs it has also become hugely popular with waterfowl hunters and the public. There are more than 32,000 registered users of this website and during the 2004 duck season there were more than a quarter million web visits generating more than two and a half million maps of the mallard flight paths across North America. In addition to the report on ESPN the site has been profiled by Ducks Unlimited, various newspapers, and even television stations in the Little Rock Area (http://www.kthv.com/ThisMorning/ducktracking/DuckTracking.asp).
Now that the initial system prototype has been completed it will be migrated to the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission who will continue to operate the site and study the positional/biological data acquired from this long-term waterfowl research effort.
Visit the Satellite Mallard Tracking project at: http://vestig.cast.uark.edu/website/waterfowl/
