Camera traps for motion-triggered or continuous time-lapse recordings are readily available on the market. For demanding applications in ecology and environmental sciences, however, commercial systems often lack flexibility to freely adjust recording time intervals, suffer from mechanical component w...
Camera images and video recordings are simple and non-invasive tools to investigate animals in their natural habitat. Quantitative evaluations, however, often require an exact reconstruction of object positions, sizes, and distances in the image. Here, we provide an open source software package to p...
During breeding, king penguins do not build nests, however they show strong territorial behaviour and keep a pecking distance to neighbouring penguins. Penguin positions in breeding colonies are highly stable over weeks and appear regularly spaced, but thus far no quantitative analysis of the struct...
1. Long-term photographic recordings of animal populations provide unique insights into ecological and evolutionary processes. However, image acquisition at remote locations under harsh climatic conditions is highly challenging. 2. We present a robust, energetically self-sufficient and remote-contro...
Scientific applications often require an exact reconstruction of object positions and distances from digital images. Therefore, the images need to be corrected for perspective distortions. We present CameraTransform, a python package that performs a perspective image correction whereby the height, t...
Emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri) breed during the harsh Antarctic winter. During mating and breeding period (in total up to four months), the males must fast, while also incubating the egg during the latter. To survive and breed successfully, they must conserve their energy. Through evolution...
Automated image based tracking is widely used to investigate collective interactions in a variety of biological systems. Applied to diverse environments, ranging from cell to animal colonies, it provides insight into biological processes like cancer metastasis, immunological response, and social str...
Penguin Observatory is on the move to Antarctica Our penguin observatory is on the research vessel “Polarstern” on its way to Antarctica. It will arrive there around Dec 20th. We hope that the observatory will not be battered too much by braking waves.
Emperor penguins are able to maintain the tight huddle that protects them from the harsh conditions of an Antarctic winter with stop-and-go movements like cars in a traffic jam. By using a mathematical model that computes the positions, movements and interactions of individual penguins in a huddle, ...
