BD&I: MoveBank: Integrated database for networked organism tracking.

The University Of The State Of New York, Albany NY

Investigators

Abstract

The University of the State of New York is awarded a grant to develop MoveBank, an integrated animal tracking research system for the the research community consisting of a reliable data acquisition and ingestion system, data stream processing and data mining analytics, and extensible architecture that supports various resource sharing models. The project is design to serve a growing global community of animal tracking researchers interested in collaboration. It will have interfaces to facilitate state-of-the-art of data analysis, mining, modeling and visualization tools. The museum will collaborate with Princeton University, the San Diego Supercomputer Center at University of California San Diego and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Studying animal movement is of critical importance to addressing environmental challenges including invasive species, infectious diseases, climate and land-use change. New tracking technologies are allowing more researchers to collect more data more easily, but science lacks the cyberinfrastructure to acquire and manage data in a scalable and reliable fashion and need tools to efficiently analyze and integrate these disparate datasets. This situation is made more challenging by the development of environmental observatories that are generating (or promise to generate) extremely large spatially-explicit datasets with automated methods, including GPS, Automated Radio Telemetry Systems (ARTS), and motion-triggered camera networks. The integration of legacy tracking databases together with real-time observatory data streams has the potential to fundamentally advance the science of animal tracking and animal-based environmental forecasting.