Partners

Movebank partners with institutions and initiatives around the world to support data archiving, development of shared tools, data discovery and acquisition for large-scale projects, and training and outreach.

Argos

Argos is a satellite-based system for collecting and transmitting data from transmitters (PTTs) placed on monitoring stations and animals for environmental protection and research or to protect human life. Over 8,000 animals are tracked using Argos. Movebank collaborates with Argos to offer free data management and analysis tools specifically for Argos users.

Birds Canada & Motus

The Motus Wildlife Tracking System is a collaborative research network that uses coordinated automated radio telemetry arrays to study the movement and behaviour of flying animals (birds, bats, and insects). Motus is a program of Birds Canada in partnership with collaborating researchers and organizations. Movebank and Motus are building a connection that will give Motus users the option to automatically transfer a processed version of their data to Movebank, in order to use Movebank's sharing, analysis and archiving features while maintaining their complete dataset with Motus.

Convention on Migratory Species

United Nations Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (Convention on Migratory Species, CMS) is funding developments on Movebank to support the development of a Eurasian African Bird Migration Atlas. In addition, Movebank's host, the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (formerly the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology), has participated in the CMS Scientific Task Force on Wildlife and Ecosystem Health.

Covid-19 Bio-Logging Initiative

The Covid-19 Bio-Logging Initiative was launched in 2020 to investigate global wildlife responses to altered levels of human activity during the pandemic through community-driven, large-scale analyses of animal tracking and other bio-logging data. The Initiative is led by the International Bio-Logging Society and has been endorsed by the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. Movebank is a founding partner of the Initiative and is helping to expand participation and enable meta-analyses through harmonized data formats and access protocols.

CRBPO

The Centre de Recherches sur la Biologie des Populations d'Oiseaux (CRBPO), the French national bird ringing scheme, cooperates with Movebank to archive data collected by electronic tags as part of avian studies that take place in France. Through this partnership Movebank serves as the archiving service for tracking data authorized through the bird-ringing center, allowing CRBPO to offer high-quality tools without the substantial costs of building and maintaining separate databases optimized for data from electronic tags. Through this collaboration, French researchers and organizations will have access to online tools and technical support through Movebank, and CRBPO will provide translations of Movebank documentation into French—which will be added to Movebank's website—as well as training and outreach in French. See CRBPO's instructions (in French) to share data in Movebank with CRBPO. This partnership is formalized through a Memorandum of Understanding between CRBPO and Movebank's host, the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (formerly the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology), signed in 2016.

EarthRanger

EarthRanger, a philanthropic product from Vulcan Inc., is a software solution that helps conservationists make informed operational decisions, supporting monitoring and security by integrating real-time data from animal-borne sensors, other hardware sensors used in protected area management, and information entered by field personnel, along with real-time, configurable alerting triggered by events such as animals crossing virtual geofences, immobility, and abnormal behavior. EarthRanger users can choose to feed data from Movebank into EarthRanger, which allows them to integrate services from both platforms and increases the number of data providers supported through EarthRanger.

EURING

The European Union of Bird Ringing (EURING) coordinates cooperation, best practices and data sharing among bird ringing programs in European countries. EURING is currently developing a Eurasian African Bird Migration Atlas under the auspices of the Convention on Migratory Species as a module of a future Global Animal Migration Atlas. Most animal tracking data that are being contributed by data owners to the atlas are stored in Movebank and will be transferred using a custom API. For more information read here.

EURODEER

EURODEER is an open project that allows researchers of European roe and red deer to share data within a single database for collaborative data management and advanced analysis. Descriptions of the datasets in the EURODEER database are searchable from Movebank. EURODEER and Movebank have collaborated on a variety of data-sharing and educational initiatives, including a graduate-level summer course for data management in movement ecology and a hands-on guide to developing spatial databases for animal movement data (Urbano and Cagnacci 2014).

Migratory Connectivity Project

The Migratory Connectivity Project (MCP) is a consortium working to advance the conservation and understanding of migratory animals throughout their life cycle through research, outreach, and education. The project is led by the by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center and Georgetown University in partnership with over 50 collaborating organizations, including the United States Geological Survey, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Coastal Bend Bays and Estuaries Program, the University of Alberta, and many more. MCP has a primary focus on birds, but has also included work on insects and fish. MCP researchers use Movebank to manage tracking data collected through projects around the world, and are using Movebank as a platform through which others can share data on movements of North American birds to be used in the development of their Atlas of Migratory Connectivity.

National Audubon Society

The National Audubon Society is a conservation organization in the United States that protects birds and their habitats through science, advocacy and education. Movebank is working with Audubon's Migratory Bird Initiative (MBI) by serving as the data platform through which researchers can contribute tracking data from across the western hemisphere to create maps, visualizations and conservation assessments being developed by MBI to identify conservation priorities, landscape threats and policy solutions.

National Oceanography Centre – British Oceanographic Data Centre

The British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) operates a vocabulary server whose basic maintenance is principally funded by the UK Research and Innovation Natural Environment Research Council (UKRI-NERC) and is commonly known as the “NERC Vocabulary Server” (NVS). The NVS hosts standardised and organised vocabularies used in data and metadata formats in the marine and related domains, and makes them accessible in human- and machine-readable formats. In cooperation with the BODC, Movebank maintains its attribute dictionary through the NVS at http://vocab.nerc.ac.uk/collection/MVB, providing persistent definitions for all data stored in Movebank.

North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences

Movebank works closely with researchers at the Biodiversity Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (NCMNS) on Movebank development, funding, outreach and training. NCMNS researchers have led several symposia and workshops about the Env-DATA System and Movebank.

The Ohio State University

Movebank works closely with researchers in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geodetic Engineering at the Ohio State University (OSU) on development, funding, training and community building. Infrastructure and archiving projects led by OSU researchers include the Env-DATA System, the Arctic Animal Movement Archive and development of tools for data management and analysis within the Yellowstone to Yukon migration corridor.

Research Institute for Nature and Forest

The Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO) is the Flemish research and knowledge center for nature and its sustainable management and use. One of their monitoring networks is the LifeWatch GPS tracking network for large birds. INBO researchers of the Open Science Lab for Biodiversity prepare and publicly share these tracking data on Movebank, and publish yearly archives in the Movebank format on the Zenodo research repository. The Open Science Lab for Biodiversity at INBO and Movebank also collaborate with other experts to develop recommendations for representing tracking data using the Darwin Core standard, including the MOVE2GBIF project.

Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute

The Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) works to study, conserve and raise awareness about migratory birds. Movebank is the primary management platform for bird tracking data collected by the SCBI's Migratory Bird Center and hosts tracking data collected by the SCBI's Conservation Ecology Center.

Tag manufacturers

Movebank works with many manufacturers of on-animal sensors to build automated data feeds and file imports. By defining attribute translations, unit conversions and format transformations, these partnerships help users/customers add their data to Movebank easily and accurately, and enables near-live monitoring and responsive management. See here for a current list of companies and data providers.

United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has signed a memorandum of understanding with Movebank's host, the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (formerly the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology). The main goal of this partnership is to better understand interaction between wild animals, livestock, and humans and species-jumping diseases that can threaten human health and food security. The EMPRES Wildlife Health and Ecology Unit at FAO supports the Movebank vision of sharing and archiving animal tracking data which has multiple conservation and health implications, including insights into the role of wildlife in the translocation of infectious diseases. The EMPRES Wildlife Unit uses Movebank to manage tracking data collected to study how wildlife may impact the spread of disease in livestock.

United States Geological Survey

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) is a scientific research agency that collects, analyzes, and distributes information about the country's biology, geography, geology and hydrology. Wildlife biologists at the USGS Alaska Science Center and Movebank have worked together to build support for Argos data in Movebank and develop the Env-DATA System, and many USGS biologists use Movebank to manage and share wildlife tracking data.

The University of Minnesota

Movebank works closely with researchers in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology at the University of Minnesota to connect animal movement data to habitat use and contextual environmental information using robust statistical models, and to increase access to such analyses to wildlife managers, field biologists and students. As part of these efforts, researchers from the Department have led training workshops and are developing analysis tools within the MoveApps platform to support data management and analysis within the Yellowstone to Yukon migration corridor.

Wireless Remote Animal Monitoring (WRAM)

The Umeå Center for Wireless Remote Animal Monitoring Project (UC-WRAM) is an open database e-infrastructure for animal sensor data. Movebank has worked with WRAM to develop prototype methods for sharing data between databases and collaborates on ways to make animal biotelemetry data and databases understandable, discoverable and interoperable.

Wyoming Game & Fish Department

The Wyoming Game & Fish Department is the agency charged with stewardship of fish, game and wildlife resources in the State of Wyoming, USA. WGFD uses Movebank for management and sharing of animal locations collected by scientific permittees. This reduces agency time needed to manage permitted data, offers additional analysis and collaboration tools for permittees, and supports restricted access to data that cannot be shared publicly.

Yale University Center for Biodiversity and Global Change

Yale University's Center for Biodiversity and Global Change and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (Movebank's host) jointly run the Max Planck - Yale Center for Biodiversity Movement and Global Change. This international research center combines expertise to advance the study of animal movements and species distributions in changing environments, and the development of new technologies and methods, with a focus on training young scientists.