Publication Date:
2024-02-07
Description:
One of the most important tasks of ecology is to understand how animals use space and time. Recent advances in the development of automated telemetry systems have enabled tremendous progress in understanding animal ecology, distribution, and behavior in both terrestrial and aquatic environments [1,2,3]. The field of biotelemetry has shifted rapidly from data-poor to data-rich field, when new technologies started to provide huge amounts of data about tracked animals, with unprecedented temporal and spatial resolution [3]. However, these new tracking tools also bring many challenges that can be effectively mitigated only through international and interdisciplinary collaborative efforts. Such initiatives represent indispensable platforms for sharing data, ideas, and technical capacity, establishment of common protocols and standards, efforts to address research questions at broader scales, implementation of international and transdisciplinary research projects, and facilitated uptake of obtained knowledge and information to inform governance and policy [4, 5].
Data sharing is one of the major goals of collaborative research networks, because sharing provides a unique opportunity to upscale data to landscape or ecosystem scales, which is simply intractable for individual research groups to accomplish independently, given the costs and logistics of instrumenting multiple areas for replicated research. Archiving data according to FAIR principles [6] and allowing connections to be forged across research groups is essential for ecologists to leverage the power of acoustic tracking against the high direct and indirect costs of project implementation.
There is a growing number of international networks for collecting and sharing telemetry data that operate around the world, including the Ocean Tracking Network (OTN), Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS), European Tracking Network (ETN), Great Lakes Acoustic Observation System (GLATOS), Acoustic Tracking Array Platform (ATAP), and Lake Fish Telemetry Group (LFTG) [7,8,9,10,11].
The LFTG was established to advance topics in aquatic ecology using shared data sets, data systems, and ecosystem thinking. We present here a brief overview of the LFTG, as an example of an international and interdisciplinary network, with its positive features, challenges, and lessons learned. We further provide an overview of the thematic series ‘Advancing Movement Ecology Through Freshwater Fish Tracking’, which has been initiated through this network, and discuss key future challenges regarding data sharing within and among such networks.
Type:
Article
,
PeerReviewed
Format:
text
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