Data Standardisation Working Group

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Overview

The Data Standardisation Working Group of the International Bio-logging Society aims to fulfill the Society’s objective to “progress standardisation of data protocols used within the bio-logging community, with a view to making databases interoperable”. These standards should support the collection and use of bio-logging data to support research and applied uses. We welcome participation from all sectors, disciplines, career stages and regions.

Activities

Through community consultation during 2017–2024, we have identified a set of key needs for bio-logging data standards, illustrated below (from Davidson, Cagnacci et al., 2025). Members of this working group have previously helped to propose and demonstrate several potential standards, including De Pooter et al. (2017), Sequeira et al. (2021), van der Kolk et al. (2022), and MPIAB (2024). Moving forward, we acknowledge that the value of data standards relies on wide adoption of standards and ensuring accessibility of standardized data. Adoption will in turn depend on incentives to standardize, curate and publish data, on tools to steward long-term access to data that are not public, and on sustainable funding streams for these efforts. Our aim is for this working group to offer an international umbrella for coordination.

Fig 1. We propose data standards for bio-logging be designed to support the following steps: (1) Heterogeneous decoded bio-logging data are transferred to a community bio-logging data platform using standard transfer protocols. (2) Data, along with additional information provided by the data collector, are harmonized, stored and curated using a standard data vocabulary. (3) These standard transfer protocols and vocabulary allow flexible data transfer and use between platforms and other applications. (4) Experts define and create useful products using standard aggregation protocols. All steps can be subject to restricted access where needed (from Davidson, Cagnacci et al., 2025).

Fig 2. Most bio-logging datasets are currently at risk of becoming inaccessible over time. The following pathways illustrate common examples of how data are stored and shared. Data may be held locally in arbitrary formats, and might never be published or shared (a); harmonized, publicly discoverable and shared privately (b); or harmonized, publicly discoverable and
available for reuse (c). Pathways are not mutually exclusive, and datasets can proceed from a to c over time. Red dashed lines indicate eventual data loss if no additional steps are taken, and green ticks indicate long-term data preservation. Data standards would considerably enhance the discovery and reuse of data (from Davidson, Cagnacci et al., 2025).

Members

The current co-chairs of this working group are Sarah Davidson (Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Germany), Peggy Newman (CSIRO, Australia), Francesca Cagnacci (Fondazione Edmund Mach, Italy). The advisory team includes Salma Abdel-Raheem, Max Czapanskiy, Luca Delucchi, Stacy DeRuiter, Connie Kot, Tina Odaka, Allison Payne, Katsufumi Sato, Ferdinando Urbano, and Qingshan Zhao.

We are building our advisory team of members to organize working group activities and communications. To get in touch, please contact ibls.datastandards AT gmail.com.

Resources

Relevant outputs by working group members

Davidson SC, Cagnacci F, Newman P, Dettki H, Urbano F, Desmet P, Bajona L, Bryant E, Carneiro APB, Dias MP, Fujioka E, Gambin D, Hunter C, Kato A, Kot CY, Kranstauber B, Lam CH, Lepage D, Naik H, Pye J, Sequeira AMM, Tsontos VM, van Loon E, Vo D, Rutz C. 2025. Establishing bio-logging data collections as living archives of animal life on Earth. Nature Ecol Evol. 9:204–213. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02585-4

Desmet P. 2024. movepub: Prepare Movebank Data for Publication (Version 0.3.0) [Computer software]. https://github.com/inbo/movepub

Huybrechts P, Desmet P, Oldoni D, Van Hoey S. 2024. etn: Access Data from the European Tracking Network (Version 2.2.1) [Computer software]. https://github.com/inbo/etn

van der Kolk H-J, Desmet P, Oosterbeek K, Allen AM, Baptist MJ, Bom RA, Davidson SC, de Jong J, de Kroon H, Dijkstra B, et al. 2022. GPS tracking data of Eurasian oystercatchers (Haematopus ostralegus) from the Netherlands and Belgium. ZooKeys. 1123:31–45. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1123.90623

Sequeira AMM, O’Toole M, Keates TR, McDonnell LH, Braun CD, Hoenner X, Jaine FRA, Jonsen ID, Newman P, Pye J, et al. 2021. A standardisation framework for bio‐logging data to advance ecological research and conservation. Methods Ecol Evol. 12(6):996–1007. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13593

Urbano, F., Cagnacci, F., & Euromammals Collaborative Initiative. 2021. Data management and sharing for collaborative science: Lessons learnt from the Euromammals initiative. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 9, 727023. https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2021.727023

Czapanskiy M, Payne A, Hale C, Roche D, Nazario E, Kendall-Bar J, Buston R, Davidson SC, Clay T, Nisi A, et al. In preparation. Trends, challenges, and opportunities in open biologging data. https://flukeandfeather.github.io/openbiologging
Payne AR, Hale CM, Kendall-Bar J, Davidson SC, Beltran RS., Submitted. Minimum reporting standards can promote animal welfare and data quality in biologging research. Preprint at https://doi.org/10.32942/X29K7X

Contribute

Interested in joining the group or receiving email updates? Contact us at ibls.datastandards AT gmail.com.