A plea for standards in reporting data collected by animal-borne electronic devices

Abstract

[ Table Omitted - see PDF ] Table 1 The current catalogue of web-based e-infrastructures for the collation, sharing, and reuse of animal biotelemetry data Repository name Host Species Regional focus Data type Web address Australian animal tracking and monitoring system Australian government Marine species Australia to Antarctica Any location and biosensor data aatams.emii.org.au Animal telemetry network US Integrated ocean observing system Marine species North America Any location and biosensor data http://www.ioos.noaa.gov/observing/animal_telemetry Eurodeer Fondazione Edmund Mach Ungulates Europe Any location and acceleration data eurodeer.org Great Lakes acoustic telemetry observation system (GLATOS) Great Lakes fishery commission Freshwater species Great lakes (North America) Any location and biosensor data (passive acoustic) data.glos.us/glatos Global tagging of pelagic predators (GTOPP) International collaboration Marine species Pacific Any location and biosensor data gtopp.org Movebank Max Planck Institute for Ornithology and University of Konstanz All species Global Any location and biosensor data movebank.org OBIS-SEAMAP Duke University Marine mammals, seabirds, sea turtles Global Any location and biosensor data seamap.env.duke.edu/ Ocean tracking network Dalhousie University Aquatic species North America Any location and biosensor data (passive acoustic) oceantrackingnetwork.org/ Seaturtle.org private organization Sea turtles Global Location data (Argos) seaturtle.org Global procellariiform tracking database BirdLife international Seabirds Global Location data seabirdtracking.org Wildlife tracking private organization All species Global Location data (Argos) wildlifetracking.org Wireless remote animal monitoring (WRAM) Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences All species Global Any location and biosensor data http://www.slu.se/wram/ ZoaTrack Atlas of living Australia All species Australasia Any location data zoatrack.org Main text The development and maintenance of these e-infrastructures require significant economic investment and a coordinated effort to address the many political, technical, and funding challenges. There are already widely accepted standards for reporting many of the variables most commonly used by biotelemetry devices (for example, providing timestamps in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and geographic coordinates in the WGS84 reference system).\n * As a first step, we also request that individual device manufacturers, if they have not done so already, provide complete written documentation (metadata) for all variables and formats currently used by their devices, if needed including a history of past changes and description of how data differ between devices, user-specific preferences, data access methods, or file formats.