Australia’s continental-scale acoustic tracking database and its automated quality control process

Abstract

Our ability to predict species responses to environmental changes relies on accurate records of animal movement patterns. Continental-scale acoustic telemetry networks are increasingly being established worldwide, producing large volumes of information-rich geospatial data. During the last decade, the Integrated Marine Observing System’s Animal Tracking Facility (IMOS ATF) established a permanent array of acoustic receivers around Australia. Simultaneously, IMOS developed a centralised national database to foster collaborative research across the user community and quantify individual behaviour across a broad range of taxa. Here we present the database and quality control procedures developed to collate 49.6 million valid detections from 1891 receiving stations. This dataset consists of detections for 3,777 tags deployed on 117 marine species, with distances travelled ranging from a few to thousands of kilometres. Connectivity between regions was only made possible by the joint contribution of IMOS infrastructure and researcher-funded receivers. This dataset constitutes a valuable resource facilitating meta-analysis of animal movement, distributions, and habitat use, and is important for relating species distribution shifts with environmental covariates.

A review of acoustic telemetry in Europe and the need for a regional aquatic telemetry network

“…A pan-European tracking network would foster the same benefits gained from large-scale networks in other regions and enable the scope of telemetry studies to be expanded from small regional acoustic arrays to networks covering entire coastlines or continents. OTN in North America and IMOS in Australia have achieved such a scope and increased data capture, generating new knowledge of use to policy makers, managers, and the public [13,14,20,21]. Nevertheless, large-scale networks also bring significant challenges, including significant losses or decommissioning of equipment due to budget reductions which could potentially influence the design and vision of such large-scale networks [14,16].…”

Animal-Borne Telemetry: An Integral Component of the Ocean Observing Toolkit

“…Analyzing data over small spatial scales limits the capacity of researchers to make comparisons of patterns among study sites and to link data from the same individuals that may move among telemetry arrays. The development of broader acoustic telemetry networks and increased data sharing has resulted in vast data sets that can provide broader information on species movement (e.g., Hoenner et al, 2018). These large data sets provide challenges in data management and analysis, especially when considering that these data are typically used to calculate movement metrics, such as home range size.…”

Enhancing the Scientific Value of Industry Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) in Our Oceans

“…Acoustic telemetry currently appears to be the best approach to understanding megafauna interactions with offshore installations (Figure 2E and Table 1). On a broad scale, deploying acoustic receivers ( Figure 3B) along continental coastlines will greatly extend telemetry networks around the world (Hussey et al, 2015;Abecasis et al, 2018;Hoenner et al, 2018), which is especially important in remote areas. In these areas, there is substantial potential for numerous O&G structures, such as platforms, wells and pipelines to become telemetry nodes and fill in the gaps between larger networks.…”