New Tools for the Env-DATA System

Several new tools, on and off of Movebank, are now available for Movebank's Environmental Data Automated Track Annotation System System (Env-DATA).

Link environmental data to more than just animal tracks: There is a new interface in Movebank to request annotations for generic time-location records—for example, over a breeding period or simulated migration—and gridded rasters—for example, across an entire study site. Read more here.

New and improved environmental data products: In addition to all the other environmental data products that you can annotate in Env-DATA, we have recently added NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement 30-min rain and snow product, as well as NASA's global MODIS Land Version 6 products, including vegetation indexes, surface temperature, land cover, fire, primary productivity, and evapotranspiration at a variety of resolutions. These include new variables and improvements on the Version 5 products we accessed previously.

Online training: We held a workshop at the last spring on how to use Movebank, Env-DATA and R to build resource and step-selection models. We have posted the R scripts, recorded lectures, and slides at https://movebankworkshopraleighnc.netlify.com.

Visualization program: Somayeh Dodge at the University of Minnesota is now distributing a fantastic program called DynamoVis that lets you create animations of tracking data. It accepts any data using Movebank's format and allows you to create videos and illustrate tracks based on other variables in the dataset, including annotations from Env-DATA. It is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.13020/D6PH49.

These tools are all free and available to anyone! If you do not have your own data on Movebank and want to try it out, browse the site to find hundreds of publicly available studies that you can use.