ABI Development: The Electronic Transponder Analysis Gateway (ETAG): An Animal Behavior Observatory

University Of Oklahoma Norman Campus, Norman OK

Investigators

Abstract

The Electronic Transponder Analysis Gateway (ETAG) is a software system enabling a biological observatory by providing professional data management and versatile data dissemination to a growing community of researchers who use Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to better understand animal behavior. RFID allows for short-range wireless communication between small transponder tags and readers, and it can facilitate tracking of individual items or animals that are equipped with a tag. RFID is a mature and ubiquitous technology, familiar to people in the form of "microchip" tags implanted in cats and dogs. A community of researchers has emerged that employs RFID to track individual birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, and even insects in a wide range of field and laboratory research endeavors. For the majority of these projects, data collection, analysis, and curation are currently done by hand, which requires individual investigators to spend considerable time on data management rather than science. ETAG will transform the practices of its user community, by creating a common infrastructure based on open-source tools that will allow scientists to collect, validate, visualize, analyze, and share data and metadata in near real-time. As a result, researchers will have new capacities both for producing novel science and for sharing their work with their peers and the general public. The capacity to follow the activities of individual animals at feeding stations and nests is a powerful gateway to conversations about Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). ETAG will provide new avenues for researchers to showcase their work and share it with the public through websites and social networking, featuring real-time updates from activities in the field. The purpose of the ETAG project is to generate informatics infrastructure for RFID-based research, and to equip the emerging user community with resources that let them get the most from their data both in terms of generating new science and performing public outreach and education. ETAG will serve as a data upload portal, a professionally curated database, and a multifaceted dissemination portal for RFID data and will also facilitate the exchange of technical information about hardware, experimental approaches, protocols, and data analysis software produced by the user community. ETAG is part of a broader initiative that will make low-cost, highly versatile RFID equipment available to the scientific community. Already, more than 50 research groups in 19 countries have employed RFID systems designed by the ETAG team to carry out data collection in field and lab settings. Improved hardware and software resources will spur even wider adoption of RFID technologies by biologists and educators. With system support for real time data exchange, ETAG will allow these users to monitor their field or lab studies remotely and respond rapidly to emerging developments or problems. In addition, a common set of Internet-based tools will make it possible for teams of biologists and/or citizen scientists to undertake studies at a continental scale with concomitant data collection at networks of field sites. Finally, the software design documents and code will all be open source, allowing scientists to form alliances with a range of engineers, web designers, and IT specialists who will help add to and maintain the ETAG infrastructure. Progress and outcomes of the project can be tracked at http://etag.animalmigration.org.