Envisioning the future of aquatic animal tracking: Technology, science, and application. BioScience, 67(1): 884-896 is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/bix098. Additional information:Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Electronic tags are significantly improving our understanding of aquatic animal behaviour and 47 are emerging as key sources of information for conservation and management practices. Future 48 aquatic integrative biology and ecology studies will increasingly rely on data from electronic 49 tagging. Continued advances in tracking hardware and software are needed to provide the 50 knowledge required by managers and policy makers to address the challenges posed by the 51 world's changing aquatic ecosystems. We foresee multi-platform tracking systems for 52 simultaneously monitoring position, activity, and physiology of animals and the environment 53 through which they are moving. Improved data collection will be accompanied by greater data 54 accessibility and analytical tools for processing data, enabled by new infrastructure and 55 cyberinfrastructure. To operationalize advances and facilitate integration into policy, there must 56 be parallel developments in the accessibility of education and training as well as solutions to key 57 governance and legal issues. 58 59

Animal telemetry is a powerful tool for observing marine animals and the physical environments that they inhabit, from coastal and continental shelf ecosystems to polar seas and open oceans. Satellite-linked biologgers and networks of acoustic receivers allow animals to be reliably monitored over scales of tens of meters to thousands of kilometers, giving insight into their habitat use, home range size, the phenology of migratory patterns and the biotic and abiotic factors that drive their distributions. Furthermore, physical environmental variables can be collected using animals as autonomous sampling platforms, increasing spatial and temporal coverage of global oceanographic observation systems. The use of animal telemetry, therefore, has the capacity to provide measures from a suite of essential ocean variables (EOVs) for improved monitoring of Earth's oceans. Here we outline the design features of animal telemetry systems, describe current applications and their benefits and challenges, and discuss future directions. We describe new analytical techniques that improve our ability to not only quantify animal movements but to also provide a powerful framework for comparative studies across taxa. We discuss the application of animal telemetry and its capacity to collect biotic and abiotic data, how the data collected can be incorporated into ocean observing systems, and the role these data can play in improved ocean management.

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Animal tracking provides integral spatiotemporal information that contributes to the growing field of movement ecology.AT is one of the main approaches to track the movements of aquatic animals.

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