OzTrack: Data Management and Analytics Tools for Australian Animal Tracking

Abstract

Studying animal movements is of critical importance when addressing environmental challenges such as invasive species, infectious diseases, climate and land-use change. The number of species tracking projects in Australia is rapidly expanding - due to both the reduction in the cost of tracking devices (radio, acoustic, and satellite) and the need for ecology management communities to study the behaviour of species across taxa, space and time. The high resolution sensor and tracking devices deployed to monitor species typically generate very large datasets which can be difficult to interpret without advanced analytical computing and visualization tools. Much of the animal tracking data collected from within Australian is not analysed or stored in an efficient and systematic manner, and as a direct result data loss and study repetition is common. The aim of the OzTrack project is to develop the critical data management infrastructure needed to support the animal tracking research community. The project is developing three software components that are described in more detail below: • A central repository for the data and metadata being generated; • A set of analysis, modeling and visualization services; • A Web portal interface that enables scientists to search, retrieve, analyse and visualize the data.