New monitoring technologies allow welfare assessment of wild animals at unprecedented scale and resolution. These tools are transforming conservation and welfare science.
Wildlife monitoring technology is revolutionizing the ability to assess welfare states in free-ranging animals. Traditional wildlife welfare assessment required capturing animals — imposing the welfare cost of capture stress on every individual assessed. Modern remote monitoring allows continuous, non-invasive welfare assessment: camera traps detect body condition, injury, and behavioral abnormalities; acoustic monitoring identifies stress vocalizations; satellite tracking reveals behavioral changes associated with welfare-compromising events. These tools are now being applied to welfare questions as well as conservation questions, creating the evidence base for understanding what wild animal welfare actually looks like in specific environments. The welfare science frontier is increasingly about interpreting the enormous datasets these technologies generate to improve understanding of wild animal welfare states.