The Motus Wildlife Tracking System (motus-wts.org) is an international collaborative research network of automated radio-telemetry receiving stations spearheaded by Bird Studies Canada. This network of more than 1200 receiver stations, from the Canadian Arctic to South America, is operated by more than 1100 collaborators. It facilitates landscape- and local-scale research on the ecology and conservation of migratory animals.?In 2018, the Partners In Flight Western Working Group (PIF-WWG) began the Western Motus Initiative. The goal is to fill significant knowledge gaps about migration ecology of species in western portions of North and South America, to inform conservation actions within the next decade.?In this presentation, we will describe the Western Motus Initiative, but will focus on our installation of 11 stations to facilitate research by The Nature Conservancy and Point Blue Conservation Science on the effects of drought and wetland management on shorebirds that migrate through California’s Central Valley. We will use these new stations to talk about choosing sites and budgeting for tower deployment. The network collaboratively serves many projects by collecting location data on animals tagged across the Western Hemisphere. We will also cover how to join the PIF-WWG to help build the Motus network in the west.