Abstract
Electronic tags have been used widely for more than a decade in studies of diverse marine species. However, despite significant investment in tagging programs and hardware, data management aspects have received insufficient attention, leaving researchers without a comprehensive toolset to manage their data easily. The growing volume of these data holdings, the large diversity of tag types and data formats, and the general lack of data management resources are not only complicating integration and synthesis of electronic tagging data in support of resource management applications but potentially threatening the integrity and longer-term access to these valuable datasets. To address this critical gap, Tagbase has been developed as a well-rounded, yet accessible data management solution for electronic tagging applications. It is based on a unified relational model that accommodates a suite of manufacturer tag data formats in addition to deployment metadata and reprocessed geopositions. Tagbase includes an integrated set of tools for importing tag datasets into the system effortlessly, and provides reporting utilities to interactively view standard outputs in graphical and tabular form. Data from the system can also be easily exported or dynamically coupled to GIS and other analysis packages. Tagbase is scalable and has been ported to a range of database management systems to support the needs of the tagging community, from individual investigators to large scale tagging programs. Tagbase represents a mature initiative with users at several institutions involved in marine electronic tagging research.
Highlights
Electronic tagging studies are providing fundamental insights into the spatial ecology of marine species [1,2,3], in support of fisheries assessment and ecosystem-based management efforts [4,5,6]
This impact may be less severely felt by groups possessing informatics infrastructure and support (e.g. Tagging of Pacific Pelagics [23] or OBIS-SEAMAP [24]) many researchers are at best either embarking on parallel development of tag databases often without the requisite IT expertise or more typically attempting to deal with extensive archives of heterogeneous native flat files within software not designed for data management, such as familiar spreadsheet environments
Mapping functionality is mediated by the MapWindow ActiveX form control (Geospatial Software Lab, Idaho State University), an open-source geographical information system (GIS) component (Table 4) with functionality including zooming and panning, layering, raster image display, and shapefile generation, attribute filtering, labeling and coloring
Summary
Electronic tagging studies are providing fundamental insights into the spatial ecology of marine species [1,2,3], in support of fisheries assessment and ecosystem-based management efforts [4,5,6]. Tagbase addresses these critical constraints by providing an accessible, stand-alone tag data management system with an integrated set of analysis tools aimed at the individual tag researcher or research group level (Figure 1). Electronic Tag Data Management with Tagbase visualizing and summarizing data in standard ways, and 4) online support at Tagbase.org and a community-driven, open-source development model.
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