Wildlife Tracker for Oceans: real-time assessment for marine fauna habitat with Phytoplankton hotspots
The "Wildlife Tracker for Oceans" is a geo-framework dedicated to the real-time assessment of Marine Protected Areas - MPAs. The software is able to retrieve live feeds from Satellite Constellations like Argos for animal tracking and Copernicus for ocean bio-physic data and it has been developed under GIS4 wildlife movement analytics.
One of the main goals of the “Wildlife Tracker” is to become a data-driven source for scientific research on biodiversity conservation, marine spatial planning, and decision-making institutions on MPAs assessment and expanded delimitation.
The Wildlife Tracker for Oceans and Blue-Cloud
The Wildlife Tracker for Oceans team got the opportunity to learn more about the work performed by Blue-Cloud by joining the Blue-Cloud Hackathon. Thanks to access to the Blue-Cloud data infrastructure, the Wildlife Tracker team could gather data from the Chl-a concentration as a proxy for phytoplankton diversity accessed through the Zoo and Phytoplankton EOV products Virtual Lab. Access to this dataset helps the analysis of animal movement overlaid with the phytoplankton map.
Thanks to the integration of Blue Cloud and other data providers on the “Wildlife Tracker”, the geo-framework offers analytical functionalities and customisable features such as:
- Geospatial Visualisation: the users can create web maps and include selected animal individuals’ tags in the study area;
- Wildlife Monitoring: the users can activate an alert system connected with the user’s personal smartphone that can be configured based on anthropogenic threats or customised geofence;
- Ocean Datasets: the users can overlay real-time ocean parameters like Sea Surface Temperature (SST) and Chlorophyll concentration (Chl-a) in your visualisation;
- Data Analytics: this feature allows to match the time and location of tracks with ocean datasets, generate up-to-date statistics based on movement analytics, and calculate metrics such as daily travelled distances, time spent in protected areas, duration of stops with spatial-temporal parameters, and activity space;
- Accessibility: the users can download their own web map with the current configuration; upload it on Github and share the up-to-date web map configuration online with other people with their personal link.
On 26 July the Wildlife Tracker for Ocean team held an online webinar (you can watch the recording below) to explain the potential offered by the framework they are developing through the presentation of a successful story of marine conservation application: “Wildlife Tracker v0.3”.
This app has been demonstrated for the implementation of the “Galapagos Whale Shark Project” with the aim to support the management of the Galapagos Marine Reserve and the protection of endangered marine species and pristine ecosystems.
