As the Arctic warms faster than anywhere on earth, people and animals in the region are experiencing profound changes due to reduced sea ice, thawing permafrost soils, changing snow and vegetation patterns, and new human development pressures. Information about movements of individually tagged animals within the region—collected for thousands of animals, and for many populations, over decades—has the potential to help us understand how their migration, breeding, foraging and other patterns are being impacted by these changes, and why some populations persist while others are at risk of extinction. However, such information, if exists, is distributed over hundreds of datasets owned by different people and organizations, with varying restrictions on their use, making long-term region-wide investigations difficult or impossible. As part of NASA’s Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE), we partnered with dozens of data owners to archive many datasets on Movebank, a free platform for animal movement data. Data are stored in user-owned studies, allowing for project-specific access rights, while organized in a standardized format and making them discoverable in one place. Data users benefit from a growing number of software tools that can read this data format, including the EnvDATA System for annotating hundreds of environmental covariates across the region. Along with other Arctic studies hosted at Movebank, we introduce a collection of studies, the Arctic Animal Movement Archive (A2MA), to facilitate large-scale, long-term and multi-species analyses for this region.
Results/Conclusions
Data owners, including government agencies, universities, conservation groups and individual researchers have so far contributed 70 studies to be made discoverable in the Archive. Collectively, these data describe movements of bears, caribou, moose, songbirds, waterbirds, raptors, mountain sheep and wolves from the late 1980s to today. Analyses using these data have revealed novel insights such as: (1) departure times for caribou spring migration exhibit a striking continent-wide synchrony; (2) appropriate remote sensing snow products are relevant to movement behavior are scale-dependent; (3) moose at high latitudes select denser canopy forests to thermoregulate in response to increases in ambient temperature; (4) adult golden eagles are increasing breeding and decreasing over-wintering periods; (5) reproductive phenology and success in gray wolves respond to both local climate conditions and regional climate indices. Participation in A2MA and subsequent research and conservation outcomes are expected to grow as we continue outreach and provide support for those interested in adding their data to the archive and initiating new collaborations.