Fig 1.
Study area in the south-eastern part of the Mongolian Gobi.
Movement path with hourly GPS locations of the collared khulan from capture on 16 Oct 2015 to pre-programmed collar drop on 16 Oct 2016.
Fig 2.
Khulan behaviour based on camera collar images.
Top: Deducing behaviour of the collared khulan from body parts and the shadow visible in images and the expected values for Image tilt and activity sensor values. Bottom: Main behaviour of other khulan seen in the camera collar images.
Fig 3.
Association of the collared khulan with other khulan based on camera collar images.
Table 1.
Main khulan behavioural categories based on different cohorts of khulan seen in the images during daylight hours from 16 Oct 2015 to 16 Oct 2016.
Fig 4.
Diurnal pattern of main behavioural categories for the collared khulan.
White background = hours with daylight throughout the year.
Fig 5.
Interpolated locations of 4.8-minute activity intervals of a collared khulan.
The map exemplarily shows the trajectories of the western part of the collared khulan’s range. Trajectories with a mix of Feeding, Resting, and Walking intervals are at times interrupted by almost pure Walking intervals.
Fig 6.
Location of 131 images where infrastructure was visible.
Red arrows point towards infrastructure complexes which we had not been aware of prior to seeing the camera collar images.
Table 2.
Khulan behaviour in images with infrastructure.
Fig 7.
Water sources available to khulan.
From top left to bottom right: i) Waterpoints: Khulan digging for ground water in a dry riverbed; Khulan drinking from a pool; Waterpoint deduced from vegetation, tracks, and animal behaviour; ii) Short term water available over larger areas: Rainwater over larger part of the ground from ongoing rain event.
Fig 8.
Match between different daily precipitation data and camera collar image information.
Top: Match between % snow cover of the 100,000 km2 khulan range from MODIS/Terra daily snow cover product and the number of images from camera collar showing snow cover. Bottom: Match between rain events derived from the GPCC First Guess daily product and measured at a local weather station near the Oyu Tolgoi (OT) mine and evidence of rain in at least one image from the camera collar on the same data.
Table 3.
Overview of the added value of additional camera collars for ecological research on far-ranging species in remote and highly variable ecosystems, as exemplified by our khulan camera collar dataset.