A new acoustic telemetry tag that identifies carrier mortality by monitoring activity level

Current acoustic telemetry technology relies on complex data modelling, interpretation of environmental sensor data, or the occurrence of a predation event to determine the death of a studied individual. We present a new acoustic telemetry tag capable of detecting whether its carrier stops moving for long enough to presume the organism has died, and of reporting the time elapsed since movement ceased. This tag was designed to increase the power of acoustic telemetry for investigating population dynamics and ecological threat processes in aquatic ecosystems by making it easier to establish when, where, and how the animals of interest die. We present a field test of these tags conducted in a freshwater lake in New Brunswick, Canada, using a combination of fixed-position tags together with tags implanted into two species of salmonid fish. We demonstrate that the new tag achieves its main objective of indicating mortality events, but that the programming of the inactivity sensor needs caref..., , # Data from: A new acoustic telemetry tag that identifies carrier mortality by monitoring activity level

All RDS files in the dataset were created with R v4.5.2. Some older versions of R may not be able to open them, but, based on R's track record, forward compatibility is likely strong.  All RDS files in the dataset include objects of R's 'data table' class, and require the package 'data.table' to be loaded prior to importing. The scripts also require the following R packages: ggplot2, cowplot, stringr

File '01_make_rawMortSensor_dataAndPlots_2026-03-23.R'
R script that processes, formats, and plots 'raw sensor' data from the new mortality-sensing tags. Part of this processing is to prepare the data for the next script, and part of it is to visualise how the two focal species differ in implied activity.

File '02_ggplot_and_cowplot_mapsWithRawSensor_2026-03-23.R'
R script that produces the fish movement figures in the main document and the supplementary material

File 'DataForSubmiss..., ,