Researchers create new tool for studying effect of environment on animal migration
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Gil Bohrer, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Ohio State, and Martin Wikelski, from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell Germany, led a team of experts in developing the Environmental-Data Automated Track Annotation (Env-DATA) system to link patterns of movement with hundreds of environmental datasets including atmospheric observations and underlying landscape information.
At any given time, countless species are moving around the globe, some covering only short distances and others crossing entire continents. GPS transmitters enable scientists to track their movements with great accuracy. Until now, however, it was a very laborious task to link the data on migratory patterns to the corresponding environmental conditions.
Bohrer, his team at Ohio State, and Wikelski worked with colleagues at the North Carolina State Museum of Natural Science, the US Geological Survey, Lafayette College and University of Illinois to develop the software module for Movebank, a freely accessible portal of animal tracking data. This allows scientists worldwide to observe temperatures, wind speed or ocean currents automatically linked to every stage of a particular migratory movement.
Env-DATA relieves end users of tedious and time-consuming tasks associated with annotation, including data acquisition, data transformation and integration, resampling and interpolation. Developed by the Max Planck Institute, Movebank documents the migrations of more than 300 different species, making it the biggest compilation of its kind in the world.
The researchers published a paper describing the Env-DATA system, “The Environmental-Data Automated Track Annotation (Env-DATA) System: Linking Animal Tracks with Environmental Data,” in the first issue of Movement Ecology (Volume 1 Issue 1 July 2013).
Env-DATA uses computer capacity from the Ohio Supercomputer Center and the Max Planck Society’s computing center in Garching, Germany. It accesses various sources of environmental data, including European and American global weather datasets, NASA and ESA measurements of vegetation, ice cover, geography and rainfall and other geographic information about topography, ecosystem, land use and human population around the world. The project was funded by NASA's Biodiversity and Ecological Forecasting program.
Category: Research
