Scaling up the Impact of Local Animal Telemetry Studies Using Movebank

Telemetry studies provide unique documentation of animal space use and behavior. However, sample sizes typically don’t provide the scale of data needed for statistically robust hypothesis testing or assessing response to long-term ecological change. Data sharing offers a way to increase sample sizes and compare results over time and across populations. Movebank (movebank.org) is a free online database of animal tracking data open to all researchers that supports sharing, management, and analysis of data describing movements of individual animals. By mapping data to a common format, the tools on Movebank become a shared resource that can support collaborative analysis. Users retain ownership of their data and define who can view and access their data. Live data feeds and flexible web interfaces allow users to import and manage their data. Analysis tools in Movebank are supplemented by easy conversion for use in other software and user-created analysis tools. The new Env-DATA System allows users to annotate animal trajectories with estimates of hundreds of environmental variables available from global remote-sensing products and weather reanalyses. Taken together, these features enable researchers and resource managers to scale up the impact of local telemetry studies and make novel contributions to the field of movement ecology.