The Room2Roam Animal Tracking Archive

The Room2Roam Animal Tracking Archive is a collection of datasets that document wildlife movements and behaviors across the Yellowstone-to-Yukon (Y2Y) migration corridor, a swath of land encompassing the Rocky Mountains of western North America. This region extends from western Wyoming, USA to the northern reaches of Yukon, Canada, and contains a variety of intact ecosystems that continue to support movements of of large mammals and migratory birds—such as grizzly bears, caribou, and golden eagles—that require free passage over large ranges and at specific areas across the region where they spend time during parts of the year, such as for migration and breeding. The scope of the Archive includes the Y2Y region as defined by the Y2Y Conservation Initiative and an adjacent region of the Northwest Territories, Canada, that is home to migratory caribou herds.

The collection currently includes 27 studies containing over 6.2 million locations of 10 species, collected from 1995 to the present, that are stored on Movebank. It is being developed as part of Room2Roam: Y2Y Wildlife Movements, a NASA-funded project that is building tools to support wildlife management and conservation in the Y2Y region through regional partnership and Movebank.

Explore the Archive

Check out this interactive map to see where participating wildlife tracking data occur throughout the region, inside and outside of protected areas. Colored hexagons illustrate the number of animal locations present—click to find out more about participating studies with data in an area, and to connect with the data owners.

A key conservation challenge in the region is to monitor and protect the habitat and migratory corridors used by caribou, elk and other ungulates in the region. This animation shows movements of caribou and elk across the Yellowstone-to-Yukon Room2Roam project region from 2017–2022, including GPS tracking data from the governments of Yukon and Northwest Territories and researcher Mark Hebblewhite. Purple shows protected lands from the World Database on Protected Areas, and green indicates vegetation greenness (NDVI) from NASA product VNP13A2. Water and political boundaries are from Natural Earth. This animation was created using the ECODATA software, created as part of the Room2Roam project.

How to participate

We invite others working in this region to join our efforts to build this data archive and develop tools on the MoveApps platform to support wildlife conservation and decision making in the Y2Y. Read more about the Room2Roam project and how to get involved.

Data owners

The Archive supports owners of wildlife tracking data in participating with both public and controlled-access data, allowing participation with data that are still being collected, represent sensitive species locations, or that require formal data sharing agreements for use. To get started, create a study on Movebank, or contact support@movebank.org for assistance. When you are ready, complete our Participation Agreement to have your study reviewed and added to the collection.

Data users

Search participating studies using the interactive map and table, or using tools for browsing and accessing all data in Movebank. The Archive, along with tools developed on MoveApps, are intended to support joint efforts throughout the Y2Y, and to connect people working to conserve migratory corridors worldwide. While some studies are open to the public, most are restricted for conservation reasons—we encourage you to contact data owners to discuss possible uses. Please read tips on collaborations using Movebank for guidance on initiating projects and requesting data access, and citation guidelines for acknowledging data owners. As described in Movebank's general terms of use, even for publicly-available data, we strongly encourage data users to contact owners about proposed uses to ensure data are understood and used in appropriate context.

Funding and maintenance

Initial development of the Archive is being provided by the NASA Ecological Forecasting Program Grant 80NSSC21K1182. Long-term maintenance and support is provided by the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and other funding partners.

Citation

To cite data participating in this archive, please see Movebank's citation guidelines. To refer to the archive itself, please refer to our project page at https://ceg.osu.edu/Y2Y_Room2Roam.

Image of moose at Abiathar Peakm Yellowstone National Park by Jacob W. Frank, US National Park Service.

Contact

For more information, contact curator Sarah Davidson at sdavidson@ab.mpg.de.

Participating studies

The following 27 studies are participating in the Archive as of April 2023. This summary includes data collected within and outside of the Room2Roam region.