A plea for standards in reporting data collected by animal-borne electronic devices

Abstract

In recent years, there has been significant investment in collaborative e-infrastructures to support biotelemetry research. Whilst these e-infrastructures are rapidly growing in size and sophistication, the current lack of standards for reporting and documenting the data collected by animal-borne telemetry devices is hampering their effectiveness. Here, we demonstrate why the current lack of standards is severely complicating the process for those developing and maintaining biotelemetry-related e-infrastructures, and provide suggestions as to how the current issue may be resolved. We hope this article will stimulate discussion across the community and facilitate the first steps towards the creation and adoption of industry standards for data collected by animal-borne telemetry devices.

The importance of sample size in marine megafauna tagging studies

“…Encouragingly, some tracking programs already have some type of open data policy, and a large range of online repositories are now available (Campbell et al. ), including Zoatrack (Dwyer et al. ), Movebank, the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS), and the Ocean Tracking Network (OTN).…”

How Big Data Fast Tracked Human Mobility Research and the Lessons for Animal Movement Ecology

“…A lack of easy access complicates and hinders any attempt to search for general patterns in animal movement and document largescale movement patterns. This major impediment to research is well-recognized (Campbell et al, 2007;Rutz and Hays, 2009;Hays, 2014;Hussey et al, 2015;Kays et al, 2015) and some attempts have been made to rectify it, notably through initiatives such as Movebank (Wikelski and Kays, 2010) (see Campbell et al, 2016 for a full list of repositories), however they do not provide open access to data. In addition, these data facilities are almost invariably focused on one group of animals (in the case of Movebank, birds) and thus represent only a small fraction of existing data.…”

“…Such an approach has also been successful for the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) Animal Tracking Database (http://imos.org.au/facilities/ animaltracking/). Open access datasets need to be coupled with appropriate, standardized metadata providing the important contextual information on the tracking data (Campbell et al, 2016). For example, details of the season, sex and maturity status of the animal tracked and details of the type of tag and its program (e.g., duty cycles, etc.)…”

“…Such constraints are not trivial and databases will need careful consideration of how to standardize the collection of such data in order to provide the context needed to facilitate big data analyses, without this being onerous to data owners. Campbell et al (2016) provides details of the data reporting standards that should be implemented for data collected by animal borne telemetry devices. However, such challenges are not unique to ecology and standardized, machine readable meta-data software (e.g., Morpho) might assist here (Hampton et al, 2013).…”

“…Collaborative research initiatives such as the Tagging of Pacific Pelagics (TOPP) program (http://www.gtopp.org/), and online repositories such as the Ocean Tracking Network (OTN) (http://oceantrackingnetwork. org/), Movebank (Wikelski and Kays, 2010), ZoaTrack (Dwyer et al, 2015) and Birdlife International (http://www.birdlife.org/) (see Campbell et al, 2016 for a full list of repositories), collectively document the movements of tens to hundreds of thousands of wild animals across diverse taxa spanning all continents and biomes (Hussey et al, 2015;Kays et al, 2015). Such datasets now offer the opportunity to transfer big data analytical approaches developed in the field of human mobility to animal movement ecology.…”