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?
Hi, I am adding a little bit to this, even tho it’s quite late.
I have been making animal trackers and working with some of the people behind movebank.
It is most certainly the reference for open animal data, as many many scientists use this to save their data. Manufacturers themselves use Movebank now either as a fallback or as the main way to deliver data to their clients. That being said, a lot of animal data, especially in Africa, is being kept private as it would be a threat to many spieces that are actively endengered or poached.
For the use of environnemental and health data, I think the first one is very controversial as the temperature sensor on trackers very rarely reflects actual outdoor temps, more often a mixture between the hardware heating up, the animal body and the air. Unless the sensor is very purposefuly designed and placed to monitor air temperature, it won’t really mean too much. We have seen many birds flying at very high altitudes (multiple kms) with temps around 20C due to presumably animal body temperature and tech generating heat as well. For the latter, I am not sure movebank even supports those data formats as they are very specific and often depends on manufacturer. You could have more luck going trough papers that use these technologies and kindly request to access part of the data.