Incorporating remote sensing and environmental data in animal movement research using the Env-DATA system and Movebank

Background/Question/Methods

Data describing individual animal movements have been collected for several decades, with technology improvements leading to improved accuracy, the ability to track more species, and skyrocketing volumes of data. These represent unique observations of movements of animal life on earth and are used to address questions about habitat use, migration patterns, and animal responses to climate and land cover variability. At the same time, satellite remote sensing and atmospheric modeling programs have created datasets that describe environmental conditions on earth from the 1970s to today. Most of these latter datasets are freely available online, and offer a valuable resource for analyzing animal movement data. However, for many biologists, the time and technical expertise needed to access and work with these data pose a significant barrier, meaning that a great deal of effort is required to associate animal locations with a few individual variables or environmental information from a single database. Our objective was to develop a free, flexible, web-based tool to allow animal movement researchers to link their tracking data to external environmental databases.

Results/Conclusions

Released in spring 2013, the Environmental Data Annotation Track Annotation (Env-DATA) System is a free online tool that allows users to link animal tracking data to hundreds of variables describing environmental conditions from global datasets such as MODIS weather, ocean, and land cover products; NCEP/NCAR and ECMWF weather reanalyses; high-resolution digital elevation models; Columbia University Socioeconomic Datasets; and derived variables such as wind uplift potential. The Env-DATA System is available on Movebank (www.movebank.org), an online database for animal tracking data that allows researchers to import and share their animal tracking data while maintaining full data ownership and access control. Env-DATA automatically accesses and interpolates environmental data from the native format to value estimates linked to animal locations in space and time. Users browse and select variables, choose interpolation methods, and receive annotated data as tabular text or gridded kml files. Additional tools to help users visualize linked data and test hypotheses about relationships between animal movements and the environment are under development. This new system provides a consistent methodology for estimating environmental conditions experienced by individual animals that can be applied to any species for which movement data exist, anywhere in the world.