for animal tracking data

Create and manage live data feeds

Movebank provides free automated, near-live data feeds for a growing number of tag manufacturers and data providers:

To request data feeds for additional providers, please contact us at support@movebank.org.

Start a feed

You can set up a subscription to automatically collect your data and add it to your study in Movebank. Follow these instructions to subscribe to automated feeds for supported tags.

For Argos PTTs, read here.

For Africa Wildlife Tracking tags, read here.

For all other feeds,

  • If you haven't already, register for a free account on Movebank and create a study to which your data will be sent.

  • If needed, update the permissions and sharing settings for the study.

  • Inform your tag provider to let them know you will be setting up a feed in Movebank:

    • Fleetronic and Movetech: Provide the Movebank ID for your study (listed in the Study Details) and a list of tags you will want access to.
    • Global Satellite Engineering: Add Movebank as a Data Connection within the GSatTrack client portal. Contact Rene Winter at rene.winter(at)gsat.us with questions.
    • Lotek: Provide your Movebank username/s and select tags you will want access to in Lotek's GPS Web Service Portal.
    • Ornitela: Provide your Movebank username/s and select tags you will want access to in the Ornitela online portal.
    • Telonics: Send your Movebank username/s to your Telonics coordinator (see instructions)
    • VECTRONIC: Activate forwarding to Movebank in the INVENTA platform (see instructions).
    • All other supported manufacturers: Provide your Movebank username/s and a list of tags you will want access to.

  • Once you have confirmation that the provider has sent this information to Movebank, log in to Movebank, return to your study in the Studies page and select your provider under Live Feeds.

NOTE: Only one feed subscription per provider is allowed within a study. Therefore, one Movebank account must have permission from the provider to subscribe to all tags within a study.

  • Select New. You can choose to select from a list of available Tag IDs or upload a file with a list of tag IDs.

    • If you do not see a Tag ID listed, either your account does not have permission to access data for the tag, or Movebank has not yet received data for the tag.
    • To upload a file containing Tag IDs, prepare a text file containing only the identifiers separated by comma (,), semicolon (;), blank ( ), tab, line feed or carriage return. The identifiers must exactly match those sent by the tag provider.

  • Select Add all tags or choose individual Tag IDs and click on . The chosen Tag IDs will now be listed under Selected tags.

  • Select Save.

Once your feed is started, learn about final steps and the timing and frequency of feed updates.

Manage existing feeds

To review the status of existing data feeds,

  • Log in to Movebank and go to your study in the Studies page.

  • Select your provider under Live Feeds:

    • For Argos PTTs, read here.
    • For Africa Wildlife Tracking tags, read here.
    • For all other feeds, the Live Feed Manager looks like this:

Image of the Live Feed Manager. Contains details about provider, feed subscriber, feed activity, which can be switched to on or off, and feed elements, which contains a list of feeds, their Tag IDs, number of Data points, Last import, and Status. Add/Remove Tags and Refresh buttons on the right. Close, new, and delete buttons at the bottom.

What to expect: When a new tag is added to a feed, a Tag ID will be automatically created if it does not already exist in the study, and data will begin to import to your study. The first import typically occurs within minutes of adding a tag to a feed, but could take up to a few hours. CTT, e-obs, Followit Wildlife, Global Messenger (HQXS), KoEco, Lotek, madebytheo, Microwave and Ornitela will provide all existing data for each tag by default. Import of older tag data is in progress for VECTRONIC tags. For Movetech tags, you can choose the date from which data for each tag should be added. Older data will not automatically be transferred from Fleetronic or Telonics, but can be imported as a custom tabular csv file.

Unexpected results: If you do not see data coming in as expected, take the following steps:

  • Make sure your subscription includes all desired tags.

  • Make sure you have taken the final steps to ensure that deployed tags are linked to animals and are visible on the map.

  • Check your Live Feed Manager to review the import status and time of last import. Report error messages to support@movebank.org.

  • Access data directly from your provider and compare it to what is coming into Movebank.

  • If these steps do not resolve the issue, contact support@movebank.org for further assistance.

To make changes to an existing feed,

  • If you are deploying additional tags, contact the provider with the required information as described above.

  • Go to the Studies page and log in to Movebank.

  • Select your provider name from under Live feeds. You will see a summary of your feed activity.

  • To change what tags are in the feed, select Add/remove tags. A window will open showing a list of available Tag IDs.

  • Select Add all tags, or select individual Tag IDs and click on or to add or remove tags from the list of Selected tags.

  • Select Save.

Note: Access to tags in data feeds is administered by the data provider as described above. Users with permission to manage a data feed might not be the same as the users who are Data Managers for a study. If you will have multiple Movebank users editing a feed, each of these users must have permission from the provider to access the data for the tags. If a user without access to tags attempts to edit the feed, the feed may stop collecting new data. You will receive a warning before making any changes that might affect the current feed.

Final steps

Once you have set up a subscription,

For studies that include the full set of original data from the tags, it is especially useful to understand the concepts of deployments and outliers in Movebank. For more about other features and tools for your study, see the data management and analysis section of this manual.

Note: Movebank relies on the Tag IDs sent by the providers to relate new data to tags in your study, so please do not change the Tag IDs for subscribed tags.

Timing and frequency of feed updates

We understand that receiving new data quickly can be critical, for example while in the field. The timing and frequency of feed updates depends on a number of factors:

  • the timing of data transmissions from your tag to the data provider;
  • the timing and frequency of updates sent by each data provider to Movebank's servers (in the case of Argos feeds, Movebank will access and import new data to your study every ~6 hours); and
  • the speed at which received data are imported to your study after Movebank receives them.

Movebank offers these data feeds as a free service and does not guarantee uninterrupted data access to data feeds, as described in our User Agreement. We make ongoing updates to the feed system to optimize processing and minimize delays in importing new data after we receive it. As of September 2019, the average time to import new feed data is 5 minutes, with a lag of around 50 minutes at the highest-traffic time of the day. Because Movebank does not use cloud storage, we can also be impacted by downtime or performance issues at the Max Planck Institute computing center where Movebank's servers are stored. If you need to receive new data more quickly or reliably than described here, we suggest talking with your tag provider about options, for example timing data transfer to Movebank to coincide with your tag transmissions, or for a more direct notification system that does not rely on receipt and import of data by Movebank.

Create a study and add data

 Create a study

 Create and manage live data feeds

  Live feeds from Argos

  Live feeds from Africa Wildlife Tracking

  Live feed notifications

 Import supported data formats

 Import custom tabular data

 Import reference data

 Update existing data

 Upload file attachments

 Help with data uploads