Motivations and fears driving participation in collaborative research infrastructure for animal tracking

Abstract

Anthropogenic derived environmental change is challenging earth’s biodiversity. To implement effective management, it is imperative to understand how organisms are responding over broad spatiotemporal scales. Collection of these data is generally beyond the budget of individual researchers and the integration and sharing of ecological data and associated infrastructure is becoming more common. However, user groups differ in their expectations, standards of performance, and desired outputs from research investment, and accommodating the motivations and fears of potential users from the outset may lead to higher levels of participation. Here we report upon a study of the Australian ornithology community, which was instigated to better understand perceptions around participation in nationally coordinated research infrastructure for detecting and tracking the movement of birds. The community was surveyed through a questionnaire and individuals were asked to score their motivations and fears around participation. Principal Components Analysis was used to reduce the dimensionality of the data and identify groups of questions where respondents behaved similarly. Linear regressions and model selection were then applied to the principal components to determine how career stage, employment role, and years of biotelemetry experience affected the respondent’s motivations and fears for participation. The analysis showed that across all sectors (academic, government, NGO) there was strong motivation to participate and belief that national shared biotelemetry infrastructure would facilitate bird management and conservation. However, results did show that a cross-sector cohort of the Australian ornithology community were keen and ready to progress collaborative infrastructure for tracking birds, and measures including data-sharing agreements could increase participation. It also informed that securing initial funding would be a significant challenge, and a better option to proceed may be for independent groups to coordinate through existing database infrastructure to form the foundation from which a national network could grow.

The rise of animal biotelemetry and genetics research data integration

“…However, whole‐genome sequencing techniques are on the rise in population genetics and the increased application of whole‐genome sequencing and the development of statistical analyses that can take advantage of such data for ecological and evolutionary questions will facilitate the growth of this field and the ability to synthesize across datasets. Similarly, there has been significant rise in the usage of shared repositories of animal biotelemetry data (Campbell et al, 2015; Taylor et al, 2017), as well as animal biotelemetry hardware and infrastructure (Crewe et al, 2020). This is being facilitated by a drive toward common data structure and formats (Campbell et al, 2016) and an increased desire to share data by younger researchers (Campbell et al, 2019).…”

Priorities for translating goodwill between movement ecologists and conservation practitioners into effective collaboration

“…Many of the similarities and differences between the groups came down to differences in people's initial drivers and motivations, which most likely also led them to their current professional specializations. Although this might seem trivial, these different motivations and drivers define how collaborations take shape (Crewe et al, 2020), especially in the light of a research‐implementation gap (Rycroft‐Malone et al, 2016). For academic movement ecologists, especially early in their career, the pressure to publish and attract funding for future projects can create an attitude that is oblivious towards the (potential) conservation merit of the data or the conclusions.…”

Automated VHF-Radio Telemetry Reveals Resource-Driven Site Utilisation Patterns in a Small-Bodied, Highly Mobile Bird (Erythrura Gouldiae)

“…This design allows for high-frequency location tracking of multiple individuals simultaneously within the array's boundaries (4). Over the last two decades, the technology has primarily been developed and used to track aquatic animals (5,6), but a growing number of terrestrial applications have emerged in recent years (7,8). However, there remains a disparity in data synthesis between terrestrial and aquatic passive telemetry applications.…”