I’ve been experimented with making AI-generated comics that tell a day-in-the-life story of an individual wild animal, based on its tracking data. To do this, I have to take a given dataset and turn a day of data into a comic script – for starters, I’ve been constraining myself to a single page. The datasets I find most compelling have sensing data beyond basic GPS position – like information about the ambient environment around an animal, or the animal’s internal state via its blood pressure/heart rate.
The data I’m working with now comes from developing relationships with researchers and asking for it, but my spidey sense says that there’s a lot of tracking data out there following a lot of species, and no one group actually knows how many animals are being tracked, let alone where the raw data is. My back-of-ye-envelope calculation says there are about 170,000 individual animals, across all taxa, that are being tracked right now, but the error bars on that number are pretty big. I’m curious if anybody has a better number for how many animals are currently being tracked, and if there is any one central location for the data, ideally with API access. For that matter, all the data I’m seeing follows a custom data format unique to the tracking hardware. Has anyone made a standard, extensible format for wildlife tracking data?