Camera traps, GPS collars, biologgers, and remote sensing technology are transforming wildlife welfare monitoring, enabling individual animal welfare assessment at population scale for the first time.
Welfare monitoring technology is changing what is possible in wildlife welfare science. Traditionally, assessing welfare of individual wild animals required invasive approaches with their own welfare costs. Remote monitoring technologies increasingly allow welfare-relevant data collection without disturbance. This enables questions that were previously unanswerable: how does an individual elk respond to hunting pressure over days? What is the daily range of a specific wolf in fragmented habitat? How does a seabird behave after oil exposure? Better monitoring data enables more precise welfare interventions and more rigorous evaluation of conservation and management actions from a welfare perspective.