Satellite and remote sensing technologies are transforming the ability to monitor wildlife populations and welfare at landscape scales, providing new insights into animal movements, habitat use, and threats.
Satellite monitoring offers transformative potential for wildlife welfare by enabling large-scale, non-invasive assessment of animal movement, habitat quality, and threats. Understanding migration routes in detail allows targeted protection of critical stopover and wintering sites. Real-time illegal activity detection enables rapid enforcement response. However, tagging animals to enable tracking still involves handling stress and, for small species, can affect behavior and survival. The welfare cost of tagging must be weighed against the conservation benefits of the data obtained.