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Davidson: Animals migrated all over the world, and if we want to
be able to look at those global migrations, and if
we also want to be able to network and compare data
about animal movements and behaviors in different regions, different species
in different parts of the world, and over long periods of time, we really need a global
database for that. So one tool we offer in
MoveBank is called the Environmental Data Automated Track
Annotation System, which we—or for short, EnvDATA,
and this is a free service that lets researchers and the public link
animal movement data to environmental information from
remote sensing products and weather models from NASA and other
providers, including the GPM precipitation data.
And so by connecting these data sources,
we make it much easier for researchers to investigate questions
about how animals’ movements and migrations are affected
by the environment around them. Part of
climate change is a phenomenon called polar amplification, which means
the rate of warming is going to occur more quickly at the
poles, at the North Pole and the South Pole. So, in the Arctic, we’re seeing
warming rates more than twice as high as the global
average. So this is causing really dramatic changes in what animals experience.
In this recent project, led by
Dr. Peter Mahoney at the University of Washington, we looked at how
movement speeds of different animal species change with precipitation
and temperature. And so we looked at data from more than
1700 animals, and we found that movement speeds of wolves,
caribou, bears and moose did not seem to be affected by heavy summer
rains, but that wolves, moose and boreal caribou
moved less where there was higher snowfall in the winter.
We also found that at higher temperatures, some species moved
less while others were moving more, which could impact predator-prey
relationships and the ability to find food as global temperatures continue to
increase and as precipitation patterns change.
We link almost entirely to globally available datasets.
The same methods can be used anywhere in the world.
This means that researchers can make assessments across migratory routes
of species traveling really long distances, make comparisons across
regions and species. And this also makes it easier for researchers in different countries
to work together. [music]