They are tracked to better understand the causes of their decline. This summer, nearly 200 reindeer from Yakutia, in northeast Siberia, were fitted with a satellite collar carrying Argos technology, developed by the Toulouse company CLS since the 1980s. reindeer are now only 400,000 when they were still a million in this tundra region twenty years ago. If global warming, famine and epidemics can partly explain this drop in populations, it is to stem the decline of this species that CLS took the head of a consortium made up of representatives of nomadic populations, scientists, d 'territorial authorities and space agencies (CNES and ESA).
A subsidiary of CNES, the company CLS has equipped 200 reindeer in Russia with a collar equipped with artificial intelligence to understand the decline of this species. DR / CLS
“These are extreme lands where many people depend on reindeer, especially nomads,” explains Christel Delmas, responsible for satellite animal tracking applications at CLS, a CNES subsidiary with 800 employees in Toulouse. The collar that equips the reindeer uses Argos technology for geolocation but also artificial intelligence to track behavior. We will know when he runs, sleeps, eats or is under stress, which, together with satellite imagery data, gives us information on the environment, vegetation, water ”. All of this data will be used to make decisions to protect reindeer. The first results should be known within a year, but access to the platform for nomadic populations, reindeer herders, is already helping them find stray animals.
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Since the deployment of the Argos beacons, 200,000 animals have been tracked from space.
The CLS company wants to go further by equipping other mammals such as bison or wild horses with these collars carrying artificial intelligence.
It also wants to move towards miniaturization to equip smaller species such as juvenile turtles.
A new innovation that will be possible in 2023 thanks to the Kinéis constellation, bringing together 25 nanosatellites, capable of tracking smaller animals.