Narration:

Transcript:

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.