A Digital Ecosystem for Animal Movement Science: Making animal movement datasets, data-linkage techniques, methods, and environmental layers easier to find, interpret, and analyze

Movement is a fundamental aspect of animal life and plays a crucial role in determining the structure of population dynamics, communities, ecosystems, and diversity. In recent years, the recording of animal movements via GPS collars, camera traps, acoustic sensors, and citizen science, along with the abundance of environmental and other ancillary data used by researchers to contextualize those movements, has reached a level of volume, velocity, and variety that puts movement ecology research in the realm of big data science. That data growth has spawned increasingly complex methods for movement analysis. Consequently, animal ecologists need a greater understanding of technical skills such as statistics, geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, and coding. Therefore, collaboration has become increasingly crucial, as research requires both domain knowledge and technical expertise. Datasets of animal movement and environmental data are typically available in repositories run by government agencies, universities, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with methods described in scientific journals. However, there is little connectivity between these entities. The construction of a digital ecosystem for animal movement science is critically important right now. The digital ecosystem represents a setting where movement data, environmental layers, and analysis methods are discoverable and available for efficient storage, manipulation, and analysis. We argue that such a system which will help mature the field of movement ecology by engendering collaboration, facilitating replication, expanding the spatiotemporal range of potential analyses, and limiting redundancy in method development. We describe the key components of the digital ecosystem, the critical challenges that would need addressing, as well as potential solutions to those challenges.