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Potentials of smartphones for biological researches. Part 2: GPS/GNSS receivers

Abstract:

Currently smartphones technology results in small portable devices, highly sophisticated and with a wide range of integrated sensors, among which are the GPS/GNSS receivers. This were incorporated to smartphones to developed location based services, which allows access to personalized spatial information, by informatics networks. There is still some distrust on the value of these sensors for scientific research but a growing number of papers had validated their use. In the current review we present the position of the general scientific literature in ecology and environmental fields worldwide in relation to location sensors at smartphones. Besides assisted GPS system, modern models incorporate multi-constellation and double frequency receivers with spatial precision similar to other commercial GPS, around few meters. Several factors should be taken into account such as smartphone model, measurement places and the goal of the research. By following appropriated validation protocols and carefully selecting the app to gather data, it has been demonstrated that this sensors in modern smartphones can be reasonable alternatives with enough quality for most of the field work uses in Ecology.