Current approaches in livestock geotagging: Assessing available technologies and applications to public health research

Livestock geotrackers are increasingly used for public health research, particularly within the field of One Health, to draw inference on pathogen exposure and human risk from livestock movement data. There are many dozens, if not hundreds, of devices available to researchers, including devices purpose built for livestock such as collars, ear tags, rumen boluses, or other formats; those intended for wildlife but suitable for livestock; and devices intended for other geotracking applications which can be retrofitted for livestock. To assist other researchers in navigating the wealth of available options, we present here our experiences with six devices—four intended for livestock, one intended for wildlife, and one intended for humans— each applied to cattle, camels, sheep, goats, and donkeys. We summarize the technical specifications and features of these devices, our deployment strategies, and our experiences in terms of battery life, durability, data quality and retrieval, and acceptability by livestock owners. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. ### Funding Statement JuM and BB received an intramural grant from the University of Washington (no grant # https://www.washington.edu/globalaffairs/gif/). Authors RS, JaM, AJ, and PM received funding from the NIHR-Wellcome Partnership for Global Health Research (220818/Z/20/Z https://wellcome.org/grant-funding/nihr-wellcome-global-healthresearch-partnership) authors IN, JG, MKN, DO, WM, and EO received funding from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency of the US Department of Defense (HDTRA12110041 https://www.dtra.mil/). These sponsors did not play any role in the study design, data collection and analysis, manuscript preparation, or decision to publish. ### Author Declarations I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained. Yes The details of the IRB/oversight body that provided approval or exemption for the research described are given below: These studies were approved by the Kenya Medical Research Institute (SERU 4550 SERU 4405), the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees of University of Washington (4555-01) and Washington State University (7081), the Research Ethics Committee of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (22-028), and the Malawi College of Medicine Research and Ethics Committee (COMREC P.08/21/3381). I confirm that all necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived, and that any patient/participant/sample identifiers included were not known to anyone (e.g., hospital staff, patients or participants themselves) outside the research group so cannot be used to identify individuals. Yes I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance). Yes I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines, such as any relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material, if applicable. Yes This manuscript presents our collective experiences using livestock GPS devices for public health research, including analysis of GPS functionality. These data are currently being analyzed to develop manuscripts related to the main hypotheses driving the respective studies, and will be released with those manuscripts.