Developing integrated database systems for the management of electronic tagging data

Recent advances in electronic tag technology have resulted in an explosion of data for marine biologists. Providing descriptions of data management systems and discussion of their strengths and weaknesses will be important in promoting a dialogue with the ultimate goal of building better systems to support research. The importance of this will only increase as large multinational, multi-institutional studies become more common. Modem memory components permit a single archival tag to collect many megabytes of data. Effective handling of the volume of data generated by multiple tag deployments is a major challenge, and an essential step before data analysis can be performed. Tags are deployed on multiple species and a single animal may carry several different tag types. Data handling systems must be flexible enough to accommodate the variety of ways tags are used, as well as the changes to tag specifications over time. This paper describes a relational database system that has been developed to meet these requirements. This database stores data from a variety of electronic tags from different manufacturers, including archival tags, satellite tags and acoustic tags. The data are downloaded, processed and stored automatically where possible. Centralising data storage allows flexibility in data access, quality control, exploration and analysis. Software programs allow access to the data from local servers or via the internet and include initial visualzation of animal tracks via a mapping system. A suite of environmental data and products can also be matched to the selected track(s), which aids initial analyses and development and refinement of scientific hypotheses.