Abstract
Anthropogenic derived environmental change is challenging earth’s biodiversity. To implement effective management, it is imperative to understand how organisms are responding over broad spatiotemporal scales. Collection of these data is generally beyond the budget of individual researchers and the integration and sharing of ecological data and associated infrastructure is becoming more common. However, user groups differ in their expectations, standards of performance, and desired outputs from research investment, and accommodating the motivations and fears of potential users from the outset may lead to higher levels of participation. Here we report upon a study of the Australian ornithology community, which was instigated to better understand perceptions around participation in nationally coordinated research infrastructure for detecting and tracking the movement of birds. The community was surveyed through a questionnaire and individuals were asked to score their motivations and fears around participation. Principal Components Analysis was used to reduce the dimensionality of the data and identify groups of questions where respondents behaved similarly. Linear regressions and model selection were then applied to the principal components to determine how career stage, employment role, and years of biotelemetry experience affected the respondent’s motivations and fears for participation. The analysis showed that across all sectors (academic, government, NGO) there was strong motivation to participate and belief that national shared biotelemetry infrastructure would facilitate bird management and conservation. However, results did show that a cross-sector cohort of the Australian ornithology community were keen and ready to progress collaborative infrastructure for tracking birds, and measures including data-sharing agreements could increase participation. It also informed that securing initial funding would be a significant challenge, and a better option to proceed may be for independent groups to coordinate through existing database infrastructure to form the foundation from which a national network could grow.
Highlights
The sharing and integration of research data between groups, institutes, and organisations has the potential to produce unique and important findings for science and humanity [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Responses were received from individuals from across all Australian states and territories, with 8 surveys submitted by individuals from New Zealand
Confidence intervals for each model-average effect included zero for the Network Benefits, Data Sharing Benefits, Support Concerns, and Cost Concerns components, which suggests that effects of age, research role and biotelemetry experience on each component score were not strongly supported by the data, i.e., respondents tended to score on those components regardless of background
Summary
The sharing and integration of research data between groups, institutes, and organisations has the potential to produce unique and important findings for science and humanity [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Whilst many fields of science have benefited from structured procedures for the sharing and re-use of data, there still persists serious concerns in the ecological research community as to its practice [13, 14] These include fears of data misuse, publication of the locations of at-risk species, interference with long-term monitoring experiments [14], use of data without consent or citation, and being gazumped to significant findings [8, 13]. Electronic devices are attached to free-ranging animals, and the sharing of infrastructure typically takes the form of field-based receivers that detect and log the presence of the electronically tagged animals when within range of a static receiver [15, 21, 24] Such ‘node-based’ networks rely on the inter-compatibility of data collected at each node to monitor animal movements at fine to broad temporal and spatial scales. In aquatic environments, (Australia: Integrated Marine Observing System [25]; North America: Ocean Tracking Network [20], Atlantic Cooperative Telemetry [26], California Fish Tracking Consortium (http://cftc.metro.ucdavis.edu/), Florida Acoustic Cooperative Telemetry (https://secoora.org/fact/); and South Africa: Acoustic Tracking Array Platform [27]), node-based networks have been integral in informing the movements, space use, meta-population structure, interactions, habitat preferences, and migration routes of aquatic animals [3, 25]—with this information being applied to the conservation and management of aquatic species [23, 28]
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