Development of bioacoustics and movement monitoring collar mounted sensors for African Savannah elephants (Loxodonta Africana) – MSc thesis project 

Collar-mounted wildlife sensors enable continuous, minimally invasive monitoring of behavior, habitat use, and inter-individual acoustic communication. Yet, attributing specific vocalizations to the correct individual in free-ranging groups remains challenging when audio is collected without tightly synchronized motion and position data. The candidate in this project will design and prototype a field-ready elephant collar that integrates wide-band acoustic recording, high-rate tri-axial accelerometery (X/Y/Z), and GPS positioning in a time-synchronized, low-power package. The system will feature precise clocking and sensor fusion pipelines so that subtle body movements and collar vibrations can be aligned with acoustic onsets, while GPS trajectories provide spatial constraints, together enabling robust focal-caller attribution. Emphasis will be placed on the ability to detect focal callers as well as power budgeting for longer deployments, rugged enclosure and microphone placement to minimize environmental noise, and serviceable data logging. The outcome will be a validated hardware prototype with open documentation, calibration and synchronization procedures, and a thesis evaluating focal-caller detection accuracy from combined sensors versus audio-only baselines.