From natural history to integrated sensing: technical advances in wildlife research

Wildlife research has been driven by a set of enduring biological questions: where animals occur, how they move and behave, how they interact with their environment, and how they respond to environmental change.Historically, these questions were addressed primarily through direct observation, specimen collection, or comparative natural history (Pastor 2018).Early naturalists, including Aristotle, Darwin, and Wallace, relied on individual records and across-species comparisons to describe the living world systematically, establishing the intellectual foundations of modern ecology, biogeography, and animal behaviour (Fagan 2007).Yet observational studies were always constrained by the visibility of animals to human observers, precluding the study of species that were nocturnal, elusive, rare, or highly mobile.Wildlife research has undergone a profound methodological transformation over the past centuries.What began as a discipline rooted in direct observation by humans has expanded into a technologically diverse field that includes telemetry, biologging, camera trapping, unmanned aerial systems, passive acoustic monitoring, environmental DNA, genomics, and non-invasive physiological sampling.Especially over the last several decades, new technological innovations have allowed scientists to have eyes literally everywhere and have changed wildlife research fundamentally.Wildlife researchers can now follow individuals across continents, record activity continuously in remote habitats, detect species from traces of DNA in water, soil or air, and infer behaviour from accelerometers, camera trap images, and soundscapes.With the help of artificial intelligence, they are skimming through millions of photos and hours upon hours of videos to answer novel ecological questions.In many systems, researchers can move beyond documenting presence to reconstructing movement, behaviour, social context, energetic state and diet composition.This special issue of Wildlife Biology brings together 26 regular research articles, reviews, and short communications highlighting the wide breadth of applications of new technical advances for wildlife research.These developments have not merely increased the quantity of data available to researchers, but also changed the scale, continuity, resolution, and invasiveness of wildlife observation.The central trajectory of technical progress in wildlife research can be understood as a shift from direct observation to remote observation and, increasingly, to automated and integrated sensing.We