Summary Motus meeting Europe 2025-01-28

General
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Summary of the Motus meeting online on 2025-01-28 9:00-16:00 CET

organised and hosted by Heiko Schmaljohann (Motus coordination group leader Europe + Africa) & Thiemo Karwinkel

About 65 participants

All presentations can be downloaded here: Cloud Storage

Session 1

  • 1 representative from each country had the opportunity to talk about the current state of Motus in their country: Who do you represent (institutions/people)? What are your main biological research questions that you (will) address with Motus? How many (roughly) and which animals do you tag per year? How many Motus stations do you operate and where? How do you finance the Motus stations? How long do you plan to run these stations in the future?

Germany:

  • see presentation pdf

Finland:

  • a few stations along the Baltic Sea Strait Kvarken on Finnish and Swedish side
  • mainly used in the past for bat tracking

Sweden:

  • extensive network on Oland Island (Ottenby ringing station) and further in the North in collaboration with Finnish stations

  • tracking vagrants, Jack snipes and Montagu’s harriers

  • no publication, yet

Norway:

  • see presentation pdf

Denmark:

  • started 1.5 years ago

  • 6 stations in total, but only permission for 2 years Ă  the cooperation with Norwegian and German projects could be a good argument to prolong those permissions

  • mainly used for bat tracking in relation to windfarms

Lithuania

  • 1 station at ringing station Ventes Ragas, currently hosted by Sander Lagerveld´s group (the Netherlands)

Russia

  • 2 stations at Kaliningrad (Courish spit) currently paused, will be switched on as soon as situation improves

  • research: post-fledgling movements of Acrocephalus warblers; bat migration; Dragonfly tracking

  • no expansion in mainland Russia planned

  • see presentation pdf

Hungary:

  • 1 station
  • used for colony attendance studies on sand martin breeding site

Austria:

  • 1 station exist near Lake Neusiedl

  • currently no projects running

  • expansion in planning

Netherlands:

  • see presentation pdf

Belgium:

  • see presentation pdf

United Kingdom:

  • see presentation pdf

Israel:

  • currently 2 Stations near Eilat ringing station
  • expansion up to 6 Stations planned
  • see presentation pdf

Session 2 Scientific talks:

Lucy Mitchell (University of Ghent, BE) - “Mapping migratory routes: Avian conservation-focused opportunities for a pan-European automated telemetry network”.

Sander Lagerveld (Wageningen University, NL) - “Movement ecology of migratory bats in response

to an ecological barrier”

Georg Rüppel (University Oldenburg, DE) - “movetrack - Obtain flight tracks from Motus data”

Fiona Mathews (University of Sussex) - Technical testing of motus recievers

Annika Peter (University Oldenburg, DE) – “Radio-tracking on Helgoland –Insights into the data” analysis

See download link for slides of presentations

Session 2

Short introduction into the tag manufacturer company Lotek by Sean Walls director for Lotek’s Avian segment (see presentation .pdf) Questions & Answers:

  • The tags are not expected to get any smaller than the NanoPin, as current battery technology does not allow for any reduction in size & weight.

  • Lotek is not currently working on implementing other sensors (pressure/temperature, etc.) in the tags.

  • Tag prices are expected to remain constant for the near future.

Short introduction into Motus Central by Stuart Mackenzie, Birds Canada/Motus Central (see presentation .pdf) Questions&Answers:

  • A research and development project is underway to integrate other sensors (pressure/temperature, etc.) into tags. Results are expected in September 2026, commercial availability may take another 1-2 years. They are expected to weigh around 1g.

Discussion about the SigFox tracking System:

Discussion of the need for miniature receivers for the general public to have in their homes/gardens:

Discussed the need for a Motus Europe coordinating group:

  • Ideally there would be a dedicated person to develop the European network, but in reality there is no funding for this.

  • Feedback from new researchers: Motus is very confusing for beginners, but help from the community is excellent.

  • A starting point could be a COST grant, which facilitates cooperation and networking. We think this would be a smart and viable next step for Motus in Europe (application deadline is 21 October 2025 Open Call: A Simple One-Step Application Process | COST)

Ă  Potential coordinators for such an application are Dmitry Kishkinev, Katrine Eldegard, Fiona Mathews, Wieland Heim, Thiemo Karwinkel, Heiko Schmaljohann, Ivan Maggini

Next meetings

There will be a dedicated symposium on Motus on the next European Ornithologists Conference in Bangor August 2025, hosted by Lucy Mitchell & Thiemo Karwinkel

The feedback from this meeting was positive, so we are planning to hold an annual meeting of European Motus users, with the next online meeting likely to take place in early 2026.

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I’m sorry I wasn’t able to make the meeting- I had full intentions of doing so. I’m excited to see that it occurred, though, and from the notes it looks like it was quite successful! I am happy to answer any questions you might have regarding CTT’s role in expanding Motus globally, and in the meantime I thought I’d at least weigh in on tag development currently underway.

Last year we released a new Motus-compatible frequency- 2.4GHz. This frequency allows for incredibly small and lightweight tags including the two varieties we produce currently:

  • BlĹ«Morpho (developed for tracking Monarch butterflies, but currently also being deployed on numerous species of Hummingbirds, and various invertebrates from bees to butterflies). This is a solar-only tag, similar in behavior to our 434MHz “LifeTag”. Being solar-only it is not constrained by the lifespan of a battery, and yet it weighs only 0.06g. So far this tag has tracked a Monarch butterfly for over 3 weeks and over 1500km…but that record will soon be broken as more of these tags are deployed.
  • BlĹ«Bat - this is the battery-only version of the BlĹ«Series tags, with behavior similar to our 434MHz “PowerTag”, but much more efficient- beeping for 76 days at a 5 second beep-interval, and weighing only 0.16g.
  • Coming later in 2025 is the BlĹ«Bird tag, a hybrid of the two above, with a small solar panel and solar-rechargeable battery, it can beep day and night and only requires a few hours of sunlight to fully recharge the battery which can last for many days in the absence of light.

Big differences between these tags and our other UHF tags:

  • BlĹ«Series tags transmit not only their encoded digital ID, but also a small data packet that includes temperature, battery voltage (BlĹ«Bat and BlĹ«Bird) and solar voltage (BlĹ«Morpho and BlĹ«Bat). They also transmit a unique packet ID allowing for further localization refinement.
  • Antenna length is only ~3cm, making it an incredibly compact tag while still putting out a comparative amount of signal power to the UHF tags.
  • While detection distances will be less with 2.4GHz, we are still regularly getting 1km with a handheld and 2km+ with aerials ~10m above ground level. We expect these distances to increase with further drone testing and look forward to hearing about your results (I know a few folks in this group have already ordered some of these tags).

Currently there is very little infrastructure to detect the BlūSeries tags, but as with any frequency adoption, that will change over time. While 2.4GHz is Motus-compatible, Motus HQ is still in the final stages of rolling out the full ingestion and display of these tags. I expect that to happen in the next few months. In the meantime, CTT has been providing detection information to researchers as a stop-gap measure. These tags can currently be detected via:

  • SensorStations using the BlĹ«Series Receiver add-on
  • CTT Nodes (V3.0 and later)
  • Terra consumer devices (Live Map here: https://map.terralistens.com)
  • CTT Sidekick handheld receiver
  • CTT Mobile app using internal Bluetooth receiver in smartphones

In addition we are working to develop new 434MHz tags with sensor capabilities. These are currently outlined in several grant applications we submitted last year so the timing of their development will be dependent on the successful funding (if funded, it will be faster). If there are specific things you are looking for please let us know and we will add that to our running list of feature requests.

We are excited to see the expansion of Motus Europe, and offer our support to help facilitate that process as much as possible. I can remember the first International Bird Observatory Conference in Falsterbo, Sweden, in 2014, when Stu Mackenzie gave a great presentation on the Motus network, and the groundwork for Motus is Sweden was laid. I remember seeing those Motus antennas on the lighthouse: Falsterbo fyr, and thinking “man, they would never let us do that in on the Cape May Lighthouse!”. But of course, Falsterbo is a special place with a rich history of pushing the boundaries of ornithological research, and when I returned to Cape May we used those experiences to build momentum here at home, and today we have a number of Motus stations in our neck of the woods that have their roots traced right back to that meeting in Sweden. Eleven years later, and it really feels like 2025 will be a big year for Motus in general, and Motus Europe specifically.

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Thanks very much for this very nice summary on CTT´s developments, David! We, as the European Community have almost exclusively focused on the development of a 150.1 MHz - System. Are there any developments and thoughts at CTT compatible with that frequency? Many thanks!

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Hi Thiemo-

Good question. The CTT SensorStation has always been developed with the maximum flexibility in mind, so that researchers using various frequencies can use a single station solution, which makes repeatability possible (comparing across stations that all have the same hardware and are all quality-controlled at the manufacturing stage). The positive side of this is obvious: a commercial-grade Motus station that anyone can use regardless of frequency restrictions in their country. This comes at a real cost, though. Raspberry Pi modules, while very effective and convenient, are also very power hungry. So are the Software Defined Radios used to record signals from VHF tags. This means large deep-cycle marine batteries and large solar panels for stations that can’t plug directly into AC power. The VHF tag encoding scheme, and the way those tags are detected, are also prone to more false positive detections. The FSK-modulated UHF tags, on the other hand, have some major benefits in terms of encoding and detection (99.9% rejection of false positives). The 2.4GHz tags are even better in terms of that, and can send variables such as temperature. So the hope is that if folks in Europe are using a SensorStation with 150.1 MHz, they can explore some of the other frequencies and decide which ones work best for their species/questions, rather than be stuck with one frequency that may not be a perfect fit for everything. Our goal has been to maximize the life cycle of the Motus network by making a station that is built in a robust way, and future-proofed enough so that researchers can build out a network, and keep using that network, regardless of what frequency they choose (and which will likely change over time).