Modern wildlife monitoring technologies including GPS collars, biologgers, and remote cameras enable welfare assessment in wild animals but also introduce capture stress and device burdens.
Wildlife monitoring for welfare research involves an inherent tension: capturing animals to attach welfare-monitoring devices causes the stress that welfare research aims to understand. The field of wildlife welfare science is developing protocols for ethical monitoring that maximize data value while minimizing capture stress. Advances in non-invasive monitoring — camera traps, acoustic recorders, aerial surveys, environmental DNA — are expanding welfare-relevant data collection without animal handling. The principle that monitoring methods should themselves be welfare-positive is now recognized as a research ethics standard in the field.