2,423 research outputs found
Large-scale animal ecology and management: integrating large GPS-telemetry datasets across multiple animal populations
No full textThe development of GPS-collars for large and medium sized animals over the last decades opened up many new possibilities to study these animals. One of the main advantages of this technology is the possibility to remotely collect large sets of standardized localizations, using short-time intervals without disturbing the animal, facilitating the possibility to localize animals 24/24 hours. Especially the standardized nature of GPS datasets have naturally lead to the ability to aggregate data over multiple populations to address both fundamental and applied questions in animal ecology. In particular, location datasets can be enriched by other sources of information of the ecological process, at the individual (e.g., survival), population (e.g., density) or landscape level (e.g., environmental covariates).
However the large amount of data also poses new challenges for treating and analyzing these datasets. Given the fact that many researchers all over the world are facing this same challenge opens up a unique possibility to work together and look for common solutions for these problems using and developing open-source software applications.
The collaboration on the use of GPS-data by researchers all over Europe working on roe deer (EURODEER, www.eurodeer.org) showed such fantastic opportunities in practice; ; by integrating GPS-telemetry data in one big standardized database, including many metadata, and linking them to habitat data, large scale analysis over gradients from north to south and east to west Europe became possible and previous impossible research questions are now being investigated.
During the workshop we will start our exploration of future possibilities for collaboration and research by presenting two cases of the use of multi-population, large scale datasets of GPS-telemetry and other individual based data from two different continents; EURODEER (given by Francesca Cagnacci) and two North American examples (given by Mark Hebblewhite). Inspired by these presentations we would like to discuss the following topics:
• is there the interest to broaden the Eurodeer experience to other species ?
• is this technically demanding?
• are there barriers to collaborating across projects and countries?
• what urgent management issues and ecological questions can be best addressed at larger spatial scales than traditional localized studies
Data Quality: Detection and Management of Outliers, Spatial Database for GPS Wildlife Tracking Data
No full textWildlife Tracking Data Management: Chances Come from Difficulties, Spatial Database for GPS Wildlife Tracking Data
No full textIn recent years, new wildlife tracking and telemetry technologies have become available, leading to substantial growth in the volume of wildlife tracking data. In the future, one can expect an almost exponential increase in collected data as new sensors are integrated into current tracking systems. A crucial limitation for efficient use of telemetry data is a lack of infrastructure to collect, store and
efficiently share the information. Large data sets generated by wildlife tracking
equipment pose a number of challenges: to cope with this amount of data, a specific data management approach is needed, one designed to deal with data scalability, automatic data acquisition, long-term storage, efficient data retrieval, management of spatial and temporal information, multi-user support and data
sharing and dissemination. The state-of-the-art technology to meet these challenges
are relational database management systems (DBMSs), with their dedicated spatial extension. DBMSs are efficient, industry-standard tools for storage, fast retrieval and manipulation of large data sets, as well as data dissemination to client programs or Web interfaces. In the future, we expect the development of tools able to deal at the same time with both spatial and temporal dimensions of animal movement data, such as spatiotemporal database
Tracking Animals in a Dynamic Environment: Remote Sensing Image Time Series, Spatial Database for GPS Wildlife Tracking Data
No full textThis chapter looks into the spatiotemporal dimension of both animal tracking data sets and the dynamic environmental data that can be associated with them. Typically, these geographic layers derive from remote sensing measurements, commonly those collected by sensors deployed on earth-orbiting satellites, which can be updated on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis. The modelling potential for integrating these two levels of ecological complexity (animal movement and environmental variability) is huge and comes from the possibility to investigate processes as they build up, i.e. in a full dynamic framework. This chapter’s exercise will describe howto integrate dynamic environmental data in the spatial database and join to animal locations one of the most used indices for ecological productivity and phenology, the normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) derived from MODI
EURODEER: animal tracking by GPS devices: 400 individual roe deer
No full textWildlife sciences have largely taken advantage of biologging technologies in the last decade, such as GPS devices for remote location of animals.
While scientific opportunities offered by those data are vast, their management can be challenging and potentially hamper their proper use. We present an experience of data management aimed at storing and querying GPS location of roe deer, in a data sharing context, EURODEER. Rooting in an existing working group on roe deer, EURODEER is a collaborative project involving more than 20 research institutes throughout Europe, with the aim of looking at scientific questions at the scale of the species’ distribution range. This stands as an example of how an effective tool can be of aid to produce better science
Partial migration of roe deer in the Alps: patterns and climate dependence
No full textDespite the abundant literature on behavioural ecology of roe deer, few studies have been carried out in the Alpine range, where the topographical complexity results in an impressive variety of habitats and climatic conditions along a relatively small spatial scale. In particular, winter conditions at high altitudes may be assimilated to those occurring in northern environments, where migrations of roe deer to wintering areas have been recorded. We captured and marked with GSM-GPS collars 29 roe deer (19 females and 10 males) in Monte Bondone area (Eastern Italian Alps, 500m-1700m a.s.l.), an isolated mountain range of about 150 km2, from January 2005 to November 2006. In winter, resident and migrant individuals occupied the same home ranges at the bottom of the valley, while in spring migrants moved to higher altitudes and stayed there until the first snowfall in autumn. Rather different behaviours were recorded in winter 2006-2007 (one of the mildest in the last decades): animals left summer areas only at the end of January, again after the first considerable snowfall. However, after reaching and occupying the wintering areas of the previous year, they moved back to summer areas as the weather stabilized, or repeated the migration route at all major weather changes. In all cases, migrations happened always along the same routes and within a 24 hours interval. Our study indicated that roe deer adapted to alpine conditions either occupying stable areas not subject to climatic extremes, or ranging in distinct wintering and summer areas. Migrant individuals showed great behavioural flexibility to climatic changes, preferring the areas occupied in the reproductive season as long as weather conditions (mainly snow cover) were not limiting to their survival. We are currently comparing trajectories of migrant and resident individuals, and of migrant individuals among the two years with contrasting climatic conditions, expecting to recognize different movement modes. We will validate our results with data from other European contexts, within the EURODEER collaborative project (http://sites.google.com/site/eurodeerproject/)
Lost in space? Figuring out the spatio-temporal scale of movement processes
No full textMovement ecology has become a new paradigm in ecological studies, through the identification of categories or compartments that apply to this essential component of life, across taxa and life kingdoms. In
parallel, the technological development has allowed to collect an exponential amount of location data, increasingly dense in information- for example at environmental or individual level. This leads us to the
consideration that increased opportunities may turn into missed opportunities, if not seen within a theoretical framework that pushes us to ask questions to be robustly answered, in the first place. Among others, the awareness of the spatio-temporal scale at which the movement process occurs is a crucial theoretical turn-around to link the ecological and evolutionary processes. In this talk, I will review some of the theoretical workflows at the basis of movement analysis, and offer a study case to navigate through the
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