Every Receiver Counts: Lessons from a Rapidly-Developing Telemetry Community in the Great Lakes

The Great Lakes Acoustic Telemetry Observation System (GLATOS) is a network of researchers conducting acoustic telemetry studies within the Laurentian Great Lakes.  Since 2010, GLATOS has fostered partnerships and project discovery through the GLATOS website and annual coordination meetings.  These connections have extended the effective geographic range of individual studies by providing basin-wide access to fish detection data.  Efforts were guided by two core principles.  First, we encouraged participation by minimizing data requirements and data sharing policies.  Second, we ensured capability of long-term archiving and scalability by adopting a data scheme that was compatible with the Ocean Tracking Network.  Examples from the GLATOS network show how each element (e.g., website, coordination meetings) has promoted positive interactions among researchers (e.g., sharing resources), minimized potential negative interactions (e.g., code collisions), and ultimately benefited fishery management.  We also describe approaches used to engage researchers and to overcome sizeable, unforeseen challenges, such as the now-common practice of recycling tags across projects, ensuring discoverability of projects and project metadata (e.g., receiver locations, tag releases), and providing mechanisms for commercial and recreational fishers to report harvest of tagged fish and learn about on-going studies.