The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the value of pooling animal-tracking data — a global tag registry would facilitate data discovery and collaboration.
). Our consortium has grown to more than 600 international collaborators, accumulating a staggering one billion location records for some 200 animal species. Despite this impressive community response, we know that this is only the tip of the iceberg.
The global tag registry that I suggest would contain metadata for tags , as well as researchers’ contact details — but not the actual tracking data. This decoupling of information would unlock the field’s full conservation potential in the short term and would build the trust required to allow raw data to be archived routinely in public repositories in the longer term.
The registry would enable researchers to check data availability at the push of a button — for example, for a particular taxonomic group, such as terrestrial carnivores, or a specific region, such as the Pacific Ocean — and to get in touch with the relevant data owners. Registry management must comply with international best practices, so robust processes would need to be set up to vet queries, pass on collaboration proposals to data owners and minimize overlap between studies.
To complement this bottom-up approach, well established initiatives — such as those associated with the United Nations Environment Programme or the International Union for Conservation of Nature — could help to build an international policy mandate and provide independent oversight. The International Bio-Logging Society, which has been working to unite animal-tracking efforts on land and at sea, could provide crucial support.
This vision is no doubt ambitious, but it is achievable. Every civil aircraft on the planet must be registered — so I am convinced that, with effective coordination, we can accomplish the same for tagged animals. Furthermore, the basic principle of hosting metadata, but not raw data, is being used productively by other databases, such asMany researchers, myself included, feel a moral obligation to the animals carrying our tags.
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