The ICARUS Initiative, short for International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space, is an international effort to track the migratory patterns of small flying animals using satellite imagery. The project began in 2002 and is expected to be incorporated into the International Space Station (ISS) by mid-2017. The director for the ICARUS project is Martin Wikelski, director of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany.
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Technology
Since the late 1980s, animal tracking via satellite has been accomplished through the use of the Argos system, but is limited to larger animals. One major hurdle to tracking the movements of birds and especially insects is creating a transmitter small enough to place on individual animals. The ICARUS project currently implements 5 g radio transmitters that include a GPS receiver, but has plans to use devices weighing less than 1 g in the future. Wikelski believes that within about five years there will be transmitters light enough to attach to a roughly 120 mg honeybee. Since the ISS is only 320 km from the Earth's surface instead of 850 km like the Argos satellites, the ICARUS trackers do not have to create as strong of a radio signal and can therefore be smaller. The transmitters tags are solar-powered and only activate when a satellite passes over them. About 5,000 to 10,000 tags are expected to be in use at the time of the 2015 launch.
Applications
The primary purpose of the ICARUS Initiative is to greatly expand available data on animal migrations for the sake of conservation, although a variety of other fields of study may be advanced by the project's information gathering. Studying the movements of birds and insects may further scientists' understanding of how natural hazards and human interactions affect animal populations. Another application for the data collected by ICARUS is to investigate a possible link between unusual animal movements and impending earthquakes. It has long been hypothesized that some birds and bats can predict earthquakes because of their ability to detect shifts in magnetic fields, but so far the only evidence to support this has been anecdotal. The project's migratory data may also provide greater insight into the propagation of animal-borne diseases like SARS, bird flu and West Nile virus.