Leveraging collaborative infrastructure for movement ecology to scale insights and preserve biodiversity data

The field of movement ecology offers expanding approaches to document and understand biodiversity on Earth, including novel opportunities to investigate animal responses to environmental change, mitigate negative impacts on biodiversity, and document species and behaviors that will be altered or lost in coming decades. Despite the growth of collaborative data infrastructures, animal-borne sensor data remain underutilized for scaling ecological insights and conservation impacts. This thesis proposes innovations that build on existing successes to drive their preservation and beneficial use. Chapter 2 convenes an international group of movement ecologists, database managers, developers and experts in data standards. We provide evidence that a large majority of bio-logging datasets are on track to become inaccessible. We then present a vision for data integration to foster cross-disciplinary use, enable dynamic applications and expand digital natural history archives. Chapter 3 launches the Arctic Animal Movement Archive, a living collection of over 200 curated datasets that document movements and behavior of 86 species. Through this collection, we find that following warmer winters, golden eagles arrive at their Arctic summering grounds earlier, that more northern caribou populations are calving earlier than at the turn of the century, and that impacts of weather on movement rates of terrestrial mammals vary among species, with potential to alter predator-prey relationships. Chapter 4 introduces a collection of papers that investigate Arctic animal migrations. I survey these studies, highlighting newly documented migrations and range expansions, demonstrations of among-individual variation and within-individual plasticity, and insights into effects of environmental change within and across trophic levels. I synthesize shared calls to address gaps in baseline information needed to understand patterns in population size and distribution. Chapter 5 describes ECODATA, a set of open-source software applications to process large environmental geospatial datasets and create custom animations. ECODATA is developed with practitioners to meet cross-jurisdictional analysis needs to improve the use of wildlife tracking data for communication and decision making. In two use cases, we visualize predator and prey movements with respect to roads and caribou calving ecology in the context of seasonal vegetation changes. Looking forward, I discuss current efforts to reimagine movement ecology, shifting from a tradition of isolated, project-specific data collection to coordinated global research and biodiversity monitoring.