Large-scale animal ecology and management: integrating large GPS-telemetry datasets across multiple animal populations

The development of GPS-collars for large and medium sized animals over the last decades opened up many new possibilities to study these animals. One of the main advantages of this technology is the possibility to remotely collect large sets of standardized localizations, using short-time intervals without disturbing the animal, facilitating the possibility to localize animals 24/24 hours. Especially the standardized nature of GPS datasets have naturally lead to the ability to aggregate data over multiple populations to address both fundamental and applied questions in animal ecology. In particular, location datasets can be enriched by other sources of information of the ecological process, at the individual (e.g., survival), population (e.g., density) or landscape level (e.g., environmental covariates). However the large amount of data also poses new challenges for treating and analyzing these datasets. Given the fact that many researchers all over the world are facing this same challenge opens up a unique possibility to work together and look for common solutions for these problems using and developing open-source software applications. The collaboration on the use of GPS-data by researchers all over Europe working on roe deer (EURODEER, www.eurodeer.org) showed such fantastic opportunities in practice; ; by integrating GPS-telemetry data in one big standardized database, including many metadata, and linking them to habitat data, large scale analysis over gradients from north to south and east to west Europe became possible and previous impossible research questions are now being investigated. During the workshop we will start our exploration of future possibilities for collaboration and research by presenting two cases of the use of multi-population, large scale datasets of GPS-telemetry and other individual based data from two different continents; EURODEER (given by Francesca Cagnacci) and two North American examples (given by Mark Hebblewhite). Inspired by these presentations we would like to discuss the following topics: • is there the interest to broaden the Eurodeer experience to other species ? • is this technically demanding? • are there barriers to collaborating across projects and countries? • what urgent management issues and ecological questions can be best addressed at larger spatial scales than traditional localized studies?