Biologging can reveal the drivers of animal mortality and support global biodiversity indicators

As biodiversity loss accelerates, effective conservation depends on understanding the processes that drive population change, including when, where, and why animals die. Yet, traditional biodiversity monitoring rarely captures mortality events or the conditions that precede them, making it difficult to identify specific environmental or human-driven causes. Rapid technological advances in animal biologging have unlocked new ways to reveal the causal pathways leading to mortality, transforming how we understand the mechanisms driving biodiversity loss.

Individual-level data from GPS, accelerometers, and other sensors generate repeated observations across full annual cycles, often without the need for recapture. These data provide high-resolution information on behavior, movement, and environmental exposure, allowing researchers to detect mortality events directly and to identify the pathways that lead to them. This talk outlines the power, potential, and challenges for animal biologging to revolutionize how researchers study animal mortality and highlights case studies demonstrating how biologging can reveal threats that would otherwise remain hidden.

Two examples illustrate the transformative potential of biologging to reveal complex and conservation-relevant causal pathways underpinning population processes. A recent study of Kirtland's Warblers, a species of conservation concern, used emerging tracking techniques to identify carryover effects of winter environmental conditions on mortality during the subsequent migration and breeding season, revealing complex causal pathways by which climate change may be undermining local conservation efforts. Complementing this detailed case study, ongoing work on a global dataset examines individual behavioral responsiveness to human development and links fine-scale movement responses to subsequent survival outcomes across species. This work reveals the extent to which behavioral avoidance or tolerance of human activity mitigates mortality risk, with direct implications for prioritizing conservation interventions.

Finally, we outline how these insights could be scaled to inform global conservation policy. Mortality-based indicators offer a promising approach for converting individual biologging records into early-warning signals that are comparable across species and useful for conservation policy. To advance this work, we are working towards developing an animal-mortality indicator. By revealing when and why animals die, biologging can help target conservation actions more precisely and strengthen global efforts to stem biodiversity loss.