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It is more possible than ever to gain an understanding of when and where wildlife roams. Advances in technology have led to increasingly lightweight and sophisticated tracking devices, and researchers are using these devices to record the movements of everything from butterflies to elephants. As our capacity to collect animal movement data grows, so does the number of datasets. As the volume of motion data increases, it becomes important to consider how best to store, manage, and share these datasets.
To meet this need, Movebank was launched in 2008. Hosted by the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (after the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology), the goal of the project is to create a free platform that will help researchers effectively manage and publicly archive animal movement data. Through of Movebank platform, researchers and wildlife biologists can upload data, share it with other researchers and, if they wish, make the data publicly accessible. Now, over a decade since first going live, Movebank hosts more than 3.5 billion animal locations and 3.6 billion other animal-borne sensor measurements describing the movements and behaviors of 1,178 animal taxa, included in nearly 7,000 studies belonging to more than 3,300 biologists worldwide. Needless to say, Movebank has become an important part of bird migration research.
Sarah Davidson joined Movebank in 2011 and is excited about the opportunity to support animal monitoring researchers from around the world through a shared data archive that will promote collaborationn and applications in research, conservation, public relations and policy.
Davidson, who serves as data curator for Movebank, works to grow the data archive by ensuring that the online platform meets the needs of the researchers it was designed to serve. “Part of what makes Movebank such an effective go-to tool for data sharing is its flexibility,” explains Davidson. “It’s designed to be compatible with all types of tracking data and can keep up with rapidly changing technology.” Plus, because Movebank Aimed at supporting projects from the very beginning of data collection, users can choose how accessible their data is, from publicly accessible datasets to those only visible to a select group of user. The availability of data for threatened and endangered species makes this accessibility sliding scale particularly helpful.
Movebank not only stores vast amounts of tracking data, but also connects researchers around the world. One goal of archiving these data in a central location is to make it easier for researchers to find and use animal movement data to answer questions related to topics ranging from changing climate to infectious disease. The Movebank the team facilitated those types of studies while promoting a culture of data sharing. “In the beginning, you have to encourage people and encourage researchers to store their data Movebank. But more and more projects require sharing data with research or use groups Movebank to help with data collection and management from day one, and these use cases often drive people to our platform,” Davidson said.
In late 2020, the Movebank team collaborated with researchers from around the world to launch a Arctic Animal Movement Archive, documenting animal movements across the Arctic and Subarctic over the past 35 years. By the result collaborative learning, they show how behavior has changed for many species in response to climate changes. As an example, they are seen as immature Golden Eagles arrive at their Arctic breeding grounds earlier after a mild winter. Such insights will be key as we determine how best to protect vulnerable species in a warming climate.
As a Migratory Bird Initiative partner, Movebank provides a central place to store and access bird migration data. When researchers agree to share their data with Audubon’s Migratory Bird Initiative, they will post their data on Movebank and make it accessible to the Migratory Bird Initiative mapping team. Maps produced by this group include citations to Movebank archive for any data they present. If anyone wants to learn more about these datasets, they can use this citation to find the original data and additional information on how, where, and when the data were collected, and to contact the data owner for questions. If the researcher has made that data publicly available, they can download them directly, and if the use of the data is restricted, they can contact the researcher to ask permission to use them.
While the Arctic Animal Movement Archive and the Migratory Bird Initiative show the potential for MovebankDavidson and his team hope that these examples are just the beginning of what is possible. As Davidson explains, “What makes Movebank a powerful way to answer questions is that it’s not just a collection of data, it’s also a collection of people.”
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