MoveBank Virtual Research Environment
Studying animal movement is of critical importance to addressing environmental challenges, dataset conservation, climate and land-use change, invasive species, infectious diseases. New tracking technologies are allowing more researchers to collect more data more easily, but they lack the cyber-infrastructure to effectively manage and share them. Our need for answers to worldwide problems makes tools that promote national and international data exchange and sharing of knowledge a high priority. The MoveBank database project started in 2007 to develop a comprehensive e-science infrastructure to acquire, integrate, manage, analyze, and share animal tracking data.
The proposed new project, MoveBank Virtual Research Environment (MoveVRE), based at University of Konstanz, Germany, complements the running MoveBank project with a VRE built around the MoveBank database. It extends MoveBank with web-based collaborative tools, definition of data and metadata standards, and deepens it with long-term data preservation. Moreover, advanced geovisualization tools are adapted and developed through a synergistic collaboration with the Viamod project (funded by the DFG grant SPP 1335).
MoveVRE will be designed and developed by an interdisciplinary team, where knowledge from informatics, librarians, and scientists will be combined. The goal of MoveVRE is to offer to scientific community an advanced e-infrastructure to face the growing research challenges that movement ecologists are called to address. Ultimately, the project will provide infrastructure development that could potentially serve a wide scientific audience in other disciplines, and with little specific adaptations facilitate virtual collaboration and promote the use of other global data storages.