An open Web-based system for the analysis and sharing of animal tracking data

Abstract

Background: Improvements in telemetry technology are allowing us to monitor animal movements with increasing accuracy, precision and frequency. The increased complexity of the data collections, however, demands additional software and programming skills to process, store and disseminate the datasets. Recent focus on data availability has also heightened the need for sustainable data management solutions to ensure data integrity and provide longer term access. In the last ten years, a number of online facilities have been developed for the archiving, processing and sharing of telemetry data. These facilities offer secure storage, multi-user support and analysis tools and are a step along the way to improving data access, long-term data preservation and science communication. While these software platforms promote data sharing, access to the majority of the data and to the software behind these systems remains restricted. In this paper, we present a comprehensive, highly accessible and fully transparent software facility for animal movement data. Results: The online system we developed (http://oztrack.org) offers a set of robust, up-to-date and accessible tools for managing, processing, visualising and analysing animal location data and linking these outputs with environmental datasets. As OzTrack uses exclusively free and open-source software, and the source code is available online, the system promotes open access not only to data but also to the tools and software underpinning the system.

Active acoustic tracking suggests that soft sediment fishes can show site attachment: a preliminary assessment of the movement patterns of the blue-spotted flathead (Platycephalus caeruleopunctatus)

“…We calculated KUDs for the first 4 days of tracking and the entire tracking period to assess both post-release and short-term space use. KUDs were produced using the 'adehabitatHR' package in the statistical software R [15] and plotted as 95 % probability contours in the ZOATRACK interface [16]. To avoid fragmentation of estimated activity spaces, Kie's rule-based ad hoc method [17] was used to estimate a suitable smoothing parameter (h).…”

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

“…Some progress is now being made on this issue with journals that are the primary outlets of this type of research insisting that data sets on which results are based also be published online (e.g., Nature), mostly driven by efforts to address the current crisis of reproducibility of results. Although initiatives such as Movebank may shift the field toward an open access model, such a global, one-sizefits-all storage facility may be difficult to manage in the long term and perhaps regional data repositories such as ZoaTrack (Dwyer et al, 2015) may be less challenging to implement (Campbell et al, 2007). In the latter, data become open access after an initial moratorium period.…”

“…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.…”

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

“…These e-infrastructures assure the permanence and integrity of these data for future use and enable scientists to share data within and between disciplines [3][4][5][6][7].…”