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Terrestrial mammal GPS and ACC data from Movebank

Peter Desmet edited this page Feb 19, 2021 · 5 revisions

By Sarah Davidson

Introduction

This dataset is a subset of GPS and acceleration data from collared mammals described in Mahoney and Young (2016) "Uncovering behavioural states from animal activity and site fidelity patterns" Methods in Ecology and Evolution. The data are stored on Movebank in the study "Site fidelity in cougars and coyotes, Utah/Idaho USA (data from Mahoney et al. 2016)" and have been published in the Movebank Data Repository with DOI 10.5441/001/1.7d8301h2.

Why this use case?

Movebank stores a large range of tracking and other bio-logging data in a shared format and with a vocabulary published on the NERC Vocabulary Server, offering good test cases for bio-logging data in Darwin Core (DwC). The datasets in the Movebank Data Repository have been reviewed for quality and completeness and are published with CC0 licenses, making them appropriate for testing proposed DwC archive formats and sharing publicly. Further, we have the goal to make these published datasets discoverable in GBIF, so we can make use of the format once it is defined.

I selected this dataset because it includes a variety of common features of bio-logging datasets that should be supported by the DwC and will require discussion:

  • measurements from location sensors (GPS) and other bio-logging sensors (acc, temp)
  • measurements taken at the same (temp) and different (acc) times as the location fixes
  • redeployments (here 2 collars on one animal at different times)
  • deployment-, tag- and animal-specific information

Status

The current version of the dataset in OBIS-ENV-DATA DwC archive format, and referred to in outstanding issues, is in the primary folder of this repository. Note that for simplicity and to keep file sizes small on GitHub, this example includes only the deployment-level metadata and the first 10 GPS and ACC records for 3 out of 19 deployments (29 KB out of 110 MB, for the csv files in Movebank's format). The complete original dataset can be downloaded from the links above (3 data files as csv and 1 readme text file).