MOTUS
Central America

A collaborative network of monitoring wildlife tracking stations

MOTUS is a system of wildlife tracking that belongs to an international research network that uses a coordinated array of automated radio telemetry to track the movement and behavior of small flying animals.

Researchers from different projects place small radio transmitters on animals such as birds, bats and large insects, and their signal is detected by receivers scattered throughout the landscape.

The data from these receivers or antennas is centralized in the National Center for Birds Canada data, where it is filtered, analyzed, archived, and shared with researchers and network organizations.

Each transmitter issues a unique signature that the receiver can determine where the animals are going, how fast they travel between points and how long they stay in a given area, among other things.

MOTUS stations are placed in strategic locations for the migration of birds throughout the American continent and with a few in Europe, Asia and Australia; within the context and migratory dynamics of the neotropical birds, the installation of stations in Central America contributes a key piece to the network of voids that we want to clear.

With it we can know what species passed by this stopover site, and when and from where they did, for example. This is a great step for the research of migratory birds in the area, but it is necessary to follow up on this effort and place more stations at other locations.