News from Movebank, the online database for animal movement (September 2014)

[Chris Merkord]

Movebank is continuing to grow, with 287 new studies and nearly 40 million new animal locations just since the beginning of this year. We have been hard at work on new site features, public outreach projects, and resources for data management and collaboration. 

The Animal Tracker App
We are excited to announce the release of the beta version of the Animal Tracker app for iPhone/iPad and Android. This app allows the public to “follow” animals being tracked using live feeds on Movebank and even contribute photos and comments. If you have ongoing studies and are interested in participating, contact support@movebank.org. 



Live feeds
We have recently added support for several additional types of live data feeds. You can now set up a subscription to automatically import data for the following tag types into your own study in Movebank: 
 

• Argos: Microwave Telemetry, North Star/GeoTrak (and DIAG format data for all PTTs)
• GSM-GPS: Cellular Tracking Technologies, e-obs GmbH, Fleetronic, and Microwave Telemetry

Read instructions here to get started. We have made it easier to add support for additional tag types, so if you are interested in having this feature for other providers contact us at support@movebank.org. 

Data filters
To help you more easily find and flag outliers and duplicate records, we have added several new general purpose data filters that can be run in the Event Editor. We welcome any feedback about how these filters perform with your data, in particular the speed filter. 

Publish your data and get more recognition!
So far this year a number of new datasets have been published in the Movebank Data Repository. These publications give you a citation and DOI for your data and can be used to meet journal data-sharing requirements. These datasets underlie new work published in Animal Migration, the European Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Animal Ecology, Methods in Ecology and Evolution, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, PLOS ONE, and Proceedings of the Royal Society B (see datarepository.movebank.org). 

In addition to getting an extra citation for your work, publishing data makes you easier to find—these datasets are now searchable on the Web of Science as part of the new Data Citation Index, the "first single source of data discovery for the sciences, social sciences and arts and humanities.” If you are interested in receiving a DOI for the data related to your own upcoming (or existing) publications, contact our curator Sarah Davidson at sdavidson@orn.mpg.de. 

Conferences and symposia
The Symposium on Animal Movement and the Environment, held in May at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, NC, was a great success. The presentations and tutorial materials from the symposium are available athttp://amovee2014.com/presentations. Presentations about Movebank were recently made at the annual meeting of the American Fisheries Society in Québec City and the International Ornithological Conference in Tokyo. 

Crowd-sourced cat tracks
The new Cat Tracker project, run by the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences along with Your Wild Life, allows cat owners in the US, Australia, and New Zealand to see where their cats go when they escape the house. At the same time, they’re getting crowd-sourced information about where outdoor domestic cats go and how this might affect wild animal populations. The data are stored on Movebank and shared on the Cat Tracker website. See a recent National Geographic story about the project here. 

Collaborations using Movebank
One of the goals of Movebank is to enable collaborations by providing a space and method for researchers to integrate multiple datasets to complete new analyses. We have added a page to the user manual with tips for coordinating collaborations using Movebank, including a sample data sharing agreement.

What’s next?
Our development team is busy preparing for the addition of additional live data feeds and advanced visualization tools for large, high-resolution datasets. We are also working on an R package that will be an extension of the Env-DATA Systemto provide new ways to access global environmental datasets in order to answer movement ecology questions. We will be presenting on ongoing work at the 5th Bio-Logging Science Symposium in Strasbourg, France (22–27 September) and the International User Conference on Argos Wildlife Applications in Baltimore, USA (Nov 18–20). 

Check our Facebook page to get more frequent updates about what’s happening at Movebank. Remember, you can always contact us with feedback or for assistance—Running short on time to put your data in Movebank but want to see it there? Have you set up a new study but aren't sure you have it organized properly? We can help you! Just contact us at support@movebank.org.

Sincerely,

The Movebank Team