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Marine Turtle Newsletter 117:47, © 2007

Marine Turtle Newsletter-Online

Clearing House for Satellite Tracking Data

Michael S. Coyne1 and Brendan J. Godley2
1SEATURTLE.org, 1 Southampton Place, Durham, NC 27705 USA (E-mail: mcoyne@seaturtle.org)
2Marine Turtle Research Group, University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus, TR10 9EZ UK (E-mail: b.j.godley@exeter.ac.uk)

The Satellite Tracking and Analysis Tool (STAT) is a free open-access product that automates the process of managing satellite tracking data, including daily data downloads, backups and map updates with a user-friendly online interface (Coyne & Godley 2005). To date, more than 750,000 locations from over 1,900 animals, including sea turtles, seabirds, marine mammals and sharks, are held within the system.

One of the major shortcomings of satellite telemetry is the relatively large up-front cost. Those deploying satellite tags within the Argos system can expect to pay $5,000 to $10,000 for each tag and associated satellite time, limiting most projects to a handful of tags each.

The increasing acceptance of STAT as the defacto standard for managing satellite telemetry data offers a unique opportunity to foster synergistic collaboration between projects and research groups, thus leveraging these relatively expensive data. To this end, we have launched a new service that allows STAT data holders to designate specific tags to be listed as available for collaborative data sharing. This new “Data Explorer” will allow users to query STAT data by species and location in a geographic browser and to highlight those data available for collaboration. The Data Explorer can be accessed online at https://seaturtle.org/tracking/explorer/.


Figure 1. Screen shot of the Data Explorer tool. The URL for Data Explorer is <https://seaturtle.org/tracking/explorer>

Satellite trackers interested in using STAT should contact tracking@seaturtle.org. To learn more about STAT visit <https://seaturtle.org/stat/>.

COYNE, M.S. & B.J. GODLEY. 2005. Satellite Tracking and Analysis Tool (STAT): an integrated system for archiving, analyzing nd mapping animal tracking data. Marine Ecology Progress Series 301: 1-7.