Animating Wildlife Movement Data for Researchers, Conservationists, and Urban Planners

Gil Bohrer, a professor of civil, environmental, and geodetic engineering at Ohio State University, has spent years building tools to analyze animal movement data, including Environmental-Data Automated Track Annotation (Env-DATA) to link remote sensing data with animal tracks. He and his team created visualizations to show animal movement.

“Everybody always loved it,” he says.

After Env-DATA launched in 2011, researchers with animal data often approached him with requests for help building analysis tools and animations. So, when the NASA Ecological Forecasting Program provided an opportunity for Bohrer, developer Justine Missik, and user outreach specialist Sarah Davidson to make data analysis available to the community of users tracking animal movement, Bohrer had plenty of experience.

Bohrer organized a coalition of end users and launched Room to Roam: Yellowstone to Yukon Wildlife Movements (Room2Roam). This initiative’s goal is to establish a comprehensive archive of animal migration data for the region, providing a valuable resource for both research and practical applications in wildlife and resource management. With that data, Room2Roam can build tools to improve wildlife management, evaluate the effectiveness of protected areas, assess wildlife migration and movement, and prioritize conservation strategies in the Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) wildlife corridor.

Room2Roam animal tracking data lives on Movebank, a global platform for hosting and accessing animal movement data gathered from animal-attached sensors. Launched in 2008 by the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, and the University of Konstanz, the Movebank site ​​now contains over 6 billion locations worldwide. Over 4,300 participants contribute data.

Historically, funded projects have focused on academic outputs such as research papers. Room2Room, on the other hand, prioritizes the needs of practitioners, according to Davidson, who is also the data curator for Movebank and the coordinator of Room2Roam.

This new approach has resulted in Room2Roam directly involving end users. At their first user meeting, Bohrer and Room2Roam project leaders met with almost 40 representatives from agencies and conservation groups working in the wildlife corridor to gather feedback for developing tools for the region. One of the top requests? Visualization.

Bohrer had been using MATLAB^® to create visualizations for his work. He approached MathWorks to fund and collaborate on the Room2Roam project, knowing MATLAB was up to the challenge. “We needed the computational force of MATLAB to handle the large amount of animal movement and remote sensing data,” he says.

Two years later, Room2Roam launched ECODATA-Animate. Built with MATLAB, the app enables researchers to create customized animations of animal movements superimposed on geographic maps and dynamic environmental observations. The app runs without a MATLAB license and offline, enabling researchers to run it on their laptops, including in remote locations without internet access.

Bohrer, Missik, and Davidson designed ECODATA-Animate with MATLAB App Designer and Mapping Toolbox™. To visualize wildlife scenes, the app uses four main data types: geographic, animal movement, environmental, and location details, such as roads and names. It can also include user-provided maps in GIS format—like maps of planned future development, for example. MATLAB combines these multiple data layers into a single integrated map.

“That was a big advantage,” Bohrer says. “Most other tools don’t do that because it’s nontrivial. MATLAB lets you handle it very easily.”

ECODATA-Animate benefits animal researchers, park services, wildlife managers, land managers, and other stakeholders monitoring animal movements and habitats. Government agencies, such as transportation, health, and agriculture, also have a vested interest in tracking animal movement.

In the Northwest Territory, researchers used a multispecies animation to illustrate how different wildlife respond to roads. Caribou shy away, potentially fragmenting populations, while bison follow the routes, increasing vehicle collision risks.

“The road affects both species, but in totally different ways,” Bohrer says.

The animations can help these diverse stakeholders better understand and communicate the behavior patterns and sustainability requirements of different species.

“Being able to watch a one-minute movie can make the difference in whether people understand the need to build a wildlife overpass or not,” Davidson says.

Once the Roam2Roam team built the tool, another goal of the NASA grant was to offer these tools to groups and researchers working with animal data across the world. While still in its early days, the reach of ECODATA-Animate is rapidly expanding since Bohrer shared the app and the code behind it on GitHub^® and MATLAB File Exchange.

“We are using an open science approach to develop and share these tools,” explains Davidson. “This lets us accelerate information exchange for applied and scientific uses.”

As a result of strong interest, Room2Roam team members have given more than 30 presentations and workshops to communities of researchers and practitioners wanting to learn more about using the tools. That includes some people in the Algonquin to Adirondacks (A2A) Collaborative, a group similar to Y2Y. A2A protects a wildlife corridor that stretches over 40,000 square miles across the eastern United States and Canada.

Bohrer once heard someone from NASA explain that you can observe nothing about everywhere or everything about nowhere. In other words, most researchers confine their observations to tiny regions, while some larger-scale efforts, such as satellites, take a broader but coarser look at the whole planet. Combining the two scales could reveal new insights into our world.

“We need to somehow combine all those point observations into a global picture,” Bohrer says. “And without open data sharing, that will never happen.”