A Digital Ecosystem for Animal Movement Science: Making animal movement datasets, data-linkage techniques, methods, and environmental layers easier to find, interpret, and anal

04/13/2020
by   Brendan Hoover, et al.
0

Movement is a fundamental aspect of animal life and plays a crucial role in determining the structure of population dynamics, communities, ecosystems, and diversity. In recent years, the recording of animal movements via GPS collars, camera traps, acoustic sensors, and citizen science, along with the abundance of environmental and other ancillary data used by researchers to contextualize those movements, has reached a level of volume, velocity, and variety that puts movement ecology research in the realm of big data science. That data growth has spawned increasingly complex methods for movement analysis. Consequently, animal ecologists need a greater understanding of technical skills such as statistics, geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, and coding. Therefore, collaboration has become increasingly crucial, as research requires both domain knowledge and technical expertise. Datasets of animal movement and environmental data are typically available in repositories run by government agencies, universities, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with methods described in scientific journals. However, there is little connectivity between these entities. The construction of a digital ecosystem for animal movement science is critically important right now. The digital ecosystem represents a setting where movement data, environmental layers, and analysis methods are discoverable and available for efficient storage, manipulation, and analysis. We argue that such a system which will help mature the field of movement ecology by engendering collaboration, facilitating replication, expanding the spatiotemporal range of potential analyses, and limiting redundancy in method development. We describe the key components of the digital ecosystem, the critical challenges that would need addressing, as well as potential solutions to those challenges.

READ FULL TEXT
research
01/31/2023

Data Science: A Systematic Treatment

There has been an increasing recognition of the value of data and of dat...
research
11/20/2021

Localized Mutual Information Monitoring of Pairwise Associations in Animal Movement

Advances in satellite imaging and GPS tracking devices have given rise t...
research
02/27/2019

Data-centric online ecosystem for digital materials science

Materials science is becoming increasingly more reliant on digital data ...
research
08/08/2020

Service Ecosystem: A Lens of Smart Society

Intelligence services are playing an increasingly important role in the ...
research
07/24/2019

Movement science needs different pose tracking algorithms

Over the last decade, computer science has made progress towards extract...
research
02/08/2022

Latent gaze information in highly dynamic decision-tasks

Digitization is penetrating more and more areas of life. Tasks are incre...
research
10/12/2021

Dynamics of scientific collaboration networks due to academic migrations

Academic migration is the change of host institution by a researcher, ty...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset