Integrated Management and Visualization of Animal Telemetry Observations: Serving data from a wide variety of platforms used in animal telemetry

Abstract

In the past two decades, rapid advances in animal transmitters, data storage tags and tracking technology have made it possible to use animals to collect high quality biological and oceanographic observations as they cruise through ocean habitats. However, despite significant investment in tagging and tracking technology, integrated data management and visualization systems have lacked. The growing volume of these data holdings, the large diversity of tag types and data formats, and the general lack of data management are not only complicating integration and synthesis of animal telemetry and tracking data but potentially threatening the integrity and longer-term access to these valuable datasets. To address this critical gap, the United States Integrated Ocean Observing System (U.S. IOOS) Animal Telemetry Data Management and Visualization System (ATN DAC) has been developed to provide an integrated system of most known transmitters and tracking systems. The ATN DAC in its first version provides a clean and intuitive Google Maps-based user interface with simple, color-coded icons for various tag types, including satellite-linked tags, archival tags, pop-up satellite archival tags, acoustic receiver buoys and autonomous mobile gliders equipped with acoustic receivers. For each tag type, the user can display additional data (e.g., animal track, acoustic detections) by simply clicking on the icons. An icon click also presents the user with a variety of additional options, which vary by platform. These include: display or download depth and temperature profile or conductivity data, display or download animal tracking data, display or download detection data, or view and query datasets through a webservice such as NOAA-Environmental Research Division's Data Access Protocol (ERDDAP) server. These data management and visualization tools are designed to enable Animal Telemetry data sharing and integrating biological data with environmental data observations and models. In this presentation we provide an overview of the ATN DAC data management and visualizations capabilities (figure 1) and linking this data service to ocean models and applications.