Understanding how wildlife move within their surrounding environment is key for effective wildlife management and conservation efforts. However, there are many challenges to integrating datasets of animal movement with those describing their surroundings, such as land cover, weather, and human infrastructure.
Many tools require extensive coding skills, specialized knowledge of how to find and process diverse datasets and formats, access to significant data storage and computing power, and a lot of time – even with real-time data collection, it can take years before these datasets can be explored, analyzed and contribute to policy.
To address these challenges, we introduce ECODATA and MoveApps, two new tools to support analysis and communication of animal movements with contextual datasets. These tools were developed as part of the Room to Roam: Yukon to Yellowstone Wildlife Movements (Room2Roam) project to study and communicate the effectiveness of protected areas, drivers of migration, and movement connectivity across thousands of kilometers along the Y2Y region.
These tools are free to use, offer interactive user interfaces, and can be shared across organizations and jurisdictions. Together, these features lower the barriers to entry, decrease the time needed to integrate, analyze and visualize wildlife tracking and environmental datasets, and promote collaboration across migration corridors.
ECODATA is a suite of free tools to support data exploration, analysis, and visualization. ECODATA empowers conservationists, researchers, and decision-makers to build custom animated maps showcasing animal movements alongside contextual land management and environmental data layers.
It includes a set of data preparation tools for accessing and processing remote sensing and other environmental data products, as well as GIS layers for contextual information. ECODATA’s animation tool creates custom animations of animal movements along with these contextual datasets, which can include remote sensing products (e.g., vegetation indices derived from satellite imagery), weather forecasting models (e.g., wind or temperature data), and GIS layers of relevant features (e.g., roads, protected areas, or wind turbine locations).
MoveApps is an interactive analysis platform for animal tracking data hosted by the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. The platform provides an easy-to-use interface for users to create analysis workflows, and an open development environment for those who want to contribute code and analysis tools.
MoveApps makes sophisticated analytical tools accessible to a larger audience, with a growing set of Apps that can be flexibly combined to explore, prepare and analyze animal movement and other animal-borne sensor data. Workflows can be shared with others, published, and scheduled to run automatically, supporting real-time conservation and decision making.
These tools are being developed in close consultation with movement ecologists, wildlife managers and conservation groups to ensure that they answer their management and research needs. Wildlife managers and conservation partners in the Room2Roam project have identified several applications that are shared across this migration corridor, and which have driven the development of ECODATA and MoveApps: animations of wildlife movements in ecological context to explore data and work with local communities, assessment of the impacts of roads, automated detection of calving and predation events, and analysis of resource selection.
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