Between 23-26 April 2018, Axiom’s Kyle Wilcox joined 21 participants from 8 countries representing the major animal telemetry networks in Africa, Australia, Canada, Europe and the USA met at the IOC project office for IODE in Ostend, Belgium to test the OBIS-ENV-DATA standard through the development of data products for scientific applications.
The participants agreed to use the OBIS-ENV-DATA DarwinCore standard to exchange and publish detection data through OBIS (both acoustic and satellite) and work with OBIS and the scientific community to develop data products for the Essential Ocean Variables (EOV) of the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS), in particular the “Marine turtles, birds, mammals abundance and distribution EOV” and the “Fish abundance and distribution EOV”.
The guidelines for the implementation of the OBIS-ENV-DATA standard for tracking data (acoustic and satellite detections) will be further finalized and documented in collaboration with the data standardization working group of the International Bio-logging Society.
In collaboration with several scientists involved in animal tracking, the OBIS secretariat is developing a data aggregation tool (which will be available as an R package) to calculate home ranges, migration pathways and movement patterns based on the tracking data in OBIS. It is expected that new public tracking data will be made available to OBIS before mid 2018 and the first products be available early 2019. It was felt important that OBIS provides access to the relevant (aggregated) data used to calculate the scientific products and provide links back to the original (raw) data sources to ensure proper data provenance and allow reproducibility.
This was the first workshop of the IODE pilot project OBIS-Event-Data, which aims at seeking early adopters of the OBIS-ENV-DATA standard and develop data products and scientific applications in particular to support the work of the Biological and Ecosystem EOVs of GOOS and the Marine Biodiversity Observation Network of the Group on Earth Observations (GEOBON MBON).
Learn more at the OBIS website.