Table 3.

A checklist and examples of how to present the relevant technical aspects.

Relevant technical aspects	How to present them	Checkboxes
Indicate the motive for the RFID deployment	Indicate the tracking objectives, including estimates of behaviors to be computed, that motivate the deployment of the RFID system.	□
Describe tracking conditions and requirements	Describe the particularities of the behaviors of interest and characteristics of the deployment environment, with a particular focus on how these behavioral and environmental specifics can be potential sources of influence on the RFID system's performance.	□
Specify the measures taken to ensure the proper functioning of the deployed system	Describe and justify the optimization measures, be they environment-related or regarding the technical settings of the system components, or considering the behavioral specificities of the animal species, which are implemented to ensure the proper functioning of RFID. The way in which Li et al. (2019) presented these system optimization measures can serve as an example.	□
Specify the technical characteristics of each of the main components of RFID	Specify each main RFID component's technical characteristics and why these characteristics have been used as criteria for selecting the components. If the components are commercially available, referencing them with at least the commercial name of the model and the name of the manufacturer would be sufficient. Sales et al. (2015) provide a good example. If these components are not commercially available (cases of customized or self-built components), giving information about each main RFID component's manufacturer and technical aspects will be necessary.	□
Present a system architecture diagram	Provide a conceptual diagram that shows schematically how the components and the subsystem interwork. This structural diagram is meant to give an idea of the system's behavior and data flow. For example, Zhang et al. (2016), Li et al. (2017), and Sibanda et al. (2020a) present such conceptual diagrams for RFID deployed for animal behavior tracking.	□
Present the data management system	Indicate the system for acquiring data, the procedure for processing them, and how the resource visit is estimated to answer the research questions. If the data management system is commercially available, the name of the program and the firm providing it should be specified. If it is custom-made, then specifying at least the programing environment and language and the database management tools will be crucial. Li et al. (2017) can inspire how to present the data management system.	□
Describe measures taken to control potential influencing factors of system performance	Describe practical arrangements and modifications made to the physical environment to counteract the potential sources of influence on the performance of the RFID system. Examples of such descriptions are presented in Maselyne et al. (2016a) and Li et al. (2019).	□
Describe testing and fine-tuning processes	Describe the trial-and-error made with various combinations of configuration and operating settings of system components to achieve the best possible performance.	□
Indicate the placement of the antennas	Describe the antennas’ placement, including where their location and how they are physically mounted and protected in the deployment environment. This description also includes the configuration, for example, polarization. In the literature, antenna placement is described and presented in images by Maselyne et al. (2016a) and Adrion et al. (2020). Their ways of describing the antennas’ placement can be recommended.	□
Indicate the operating parameters of the system finally adopted	Indicate the configuration and operating settings adopted finally. Such indications may include the adopted transmit or output power and mode of communication between tags and readers (Adrion et al., 2020).	□
Characterize the reading range	Schematically present the tags' detectability across the reading area. For example, one could be inspired by Wang et al. (2019) and Adrion et al. (2020).	□