Why use Movebank?

Movebank is free to use and offers a growing number of services for managing, sharing, analyzing and archiving animal movement and bio-logging data.

Manage

The Movebank database supports the import of animal tracking data based on almost any method—GPS, Argos Doppler locations, radio and acoustic telemetry, solar geolocators, bird rings and natural markers—along with associated attributes and measurements from other on-animal sensors. Once imported, you can view tracks, manage deployment information and use all the other Movebank features described below. Having your data in Movebank also serves as a free backup of data you have stored on your personal computer.

Manage data and deployments: Add new data and provide and manage deployment details (reference data) from the Studies page or using the Deployment Manager. Reference data can also be imported directly from the field using the Animal Tagger App.

Set up live data feeds: We offer automated data feeds for a growing number of data providers. If you are currently collecting data from these tags, you can set up a live feed in Movebank that will import new locations several times daily.

Edit and filter data: Use the Event Editor to manually mark outliers, annotate behavioural or migration classes or apply a variety of data filters.

Share

Researchers maintain full ownership and control over the level of access to their data in Movebank. Movebank has flexible permissions settings for data owners, allowing you to easily share different levels of access with Collaborators and the public and define your own terms of use.

Find and be found: By publicly sharing your study summary on Movebank, you can make it easy for others to discover your work: journalists, researchers looking for collaborators, prospective graduate students or wildlife conservation groups.

Connect with researchers and data for collaborative projects: Once imported to Movebank, all data are harmonized using a single data model and vocabulary. This feature, together with the ability to share your data privately with other collaborators, overcomes a major hurdle to meta-analyses, data re-use and other applications that require a standard input format.

Share animals with sponsors, organizations, governing bodies, or the public: You can grant permission on a case-by-case basis view specific animals' tracks using the Animal Tracker App.

Analyze

Movebank provides tools for making edits to tracking data and filtering to flag outliers based on user-defined parameters. In addition, you can easily download your data for use in ArcGIS, Google Earth and other programs.

Link your tracks to environmental data: You can use Movebank to link tracking data to hundreds of environmental parameters from global remote sensing datasets and weather forecasting models using the Env-DATA System and ECODATA software.

Analyze Movebank data in other programs: Our companion analysis platform, MoveApps, offers a user-friendly platform for running code-free analysis workflows, and for contributing open-source modules or "Apps" that can be published and made available for others. A growing number of other software tools allow you to access data from Movebank for further analysis. Our API makes it possible to flexibly access data for external use.

Archive

Fifty years from now, how will your study populations have changed? Will your data be available to help answer new questions about ecology, evolution and global change? Collecting animal tracking data takes enormous time, effort and funding, and also impacts the animals who carry tracking tags. We believe that these data provide invaluable records about nature and should be preserved for future generations, and ask that data owners using Movebank to develop an archiving plan.

Formally archive your data: The Movebank Data Repository is a public online archive of tracking datasets that includes formal review, digital object identifiers (DOIs), data licenses and research citations.

Choose embargo periods and data licenses: Flexible Permissions options help you plan for making data public in the future.

Publish MoveApps workflows: MoveApps allows you to publish workflows used for analyses, making your work permanently citable and reproducible.

Build a project archive: For projects involving many studies, you can leverage the Movebank infrastructure to develop collections for large projects and initiatives to improve public engagement, meet data-sharing requirements, and run applications. Examples include the Arctic Animal Movement Archive, the National Audubon Society's Migratory Bird Initiative Collection, and the Room2Roam Animal Tracking Archive.