Om UC-WRAM

Senast ändrad: 18 juli 2016

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During the last 40 years in Sweden and other countries radio collars, fish tags, or other telemetry equipment were used to track fish and wildlife to, for example, study migration, movements, and habitat use. This telemetry equipment has relied most often on techniques based on traditional radio-telemetry using ‘Very High Frequency’ (VHF)- or ‘Ultra High Frequency’ (UHF) radio collars. One of the disadvantages with these techniques is that they are labor intensive as it requires personnel in the field for acquiring locations, causing a relatively spares number of positions per individual, with relatively large intervals of observation. Hence, many analysis methods developed to scrutinize this type of data often were developed with relatively small data sets in mind. Data storage and processing could be easily accomplished with standard desktop computer software and hardware.

In recent years more and more Global Positioning System (GPS) telemetry collars and automated telemetry equipment are used. Due to the automated fashion of position gathering and storage, and improved battery life time of the equipment, the average costs per position are shrinking, resulting in large datasets per individual. For example, more and more research groups in Scandinavia are using now GPS telemetry collars on wildlife in increasing numbers per study. The fast increase of GPS-based studies in Scandinavia and Europe requires new analytical approaches to be developed to handle this new type of data quality and quantity. A new trend is to use additional sensors beside the GPS receiver in the same telemetry collar as e.g., activity, body temperature, heart beat or proximity sensors.

Hence, the amount and type of data collected for a single individual increased even more and opens up for new fields of research. Due to the huge amount of data available, single research groups are often not able to analyze their data in a timely fashion anymore and want to share their data with similar research projects to obtain synergy effects.

Thus, an international database infrastructure to share, access, secure and analyze similar wireless remote animal monitoring data is needed to enable present and future national and international cooperation.

Access to the data, data ownership, and co-authoring in publications will be regulated by contracts between the participating researchers.