State-of-the art methodologies to monitor behavior in rangelands

Over the last years, animal behavior research has taken advance from technologies not developed for this specific aim. The object of this paper is to focus the historical evolution of the application of the technologies to identify and to monitor animals. The ambition of ethologists and experts in landscape planning is to understand how environmental and morphological aspects influence animals’ physiology and behavior, affecting movement and distribution of the heads in the land. In time a lot of various solutions have been thought up in order to record spatial data and time spotting of the animals in grazing areas. From first radio-telemetry approaches in the fifties to automatic photographing or videotaping, technology has made huge progress thanks to the digital revolution. Instruments have become more sophisticate, precise and automatic. The analysis of the capacity and limits of them can be useful to offer a complete overview about new opportunities of planning good research methodology. Bibliographical studies point out analogies, differences and technological progresses of different systems of identification useful both for wild and domestic animal population. The survey of conventional radio technologies, satellite telemetry and wireless and RFID systems allow to investigate the real potentialities and new opportunities of different solutions. Outcomes of this paper trace the working out of new features of these technologies: automatic elaboration of databases, precision of remote sensing, minimizing instrument and human mistakes. All these characteristics, added to the capacity of integrate digital outputs in GIS, let researchers enable to operate widely and efficiently. The researchers will be able to integrate the technologies in order to create an environmental analysis methodology aimed to optimize and rationalize animal management performance. Therefore this approach will allow to propose objective remarks for environmental planning connected with sustainable use of the resources of the rangelands.