The Continued Evolution of Tracking Technology for Wild Giraffe (Giraffa spp.)

Giraffe (Giraffa spp.) increasingly inhabit fragmented, human-dominated landscapes, accelerating the need for high-resolution, reliable movement data to understand how their movement ecology responds to anthropogenic disturbances. This review provides a critical update to the synthesis of giraffe-tracking technology by evaluating the performance of 408 newly designed or upgraded tracking units deployed in nine African countries between 2024 and 2025. We assessed the evolution of hardware across multiple platforms, including Iridium, GlobalStar, LoRaWAN, and Sigfox networks. For each unit, we quantified fix success, data continuity, and battery performance, and assessed the influence of vegetation cover through regression analysis. A recently developed Iridium tail-mounted unit is emerging as the most reliable unit for giraffe, achieving a mean fix success rate of 0.96 based on one year of field data and 108 deployed units (deployments ongoing). Our findings indicate that, regardless of unit placement (tail or ear) or satellite communication system (Iridium or GlobalStar), units that spent more time in denser vegetation generally showed poorer performance in both fix rate and battery rate, suggesting difficulties with both clear-sky for communication and solar exposure for charging. This underscores the importance of aligning programmed fix schedules with local environmental variables. We conclude that the tail-mounted unit currently offers the best balance of longevity and data quality for long-term giraffe monitoring and conservation management, but it is the most expensive. It is essential to align the right unit for the right needs, including fitment, costs, data requirements, and environmental features.