Data Standardisation Working Group

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.

Through community consultation during 2017–2024, we have identified a set of key needs for bio-logging data standards (from Davidson, Cagnacci et al., 2024), illustrated below.

Members of this working group have helped to propose and demonstrate several potential standards, including De Pooter et al. (2017), Sequeira et al. (2021), Rutz (2022), 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, tools to steward long-term access to data that are not public, and sustainable funding streams for these efforts. Our aim is for this working group to offer an international umbrella for coordination.

The current co-chairs of this working group are Peggy Newman (CSIRO, Australia), Francesca Cagnacci (​​Fondazione Edmund Mach, Italy) and Sarah Davidson (Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Germany). We are currently organizing an advisory team of members to organize working group activities and communications. To get in touch, please contact ibls.datastandards@gmail.com.

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