Ghosts in the data: false detections in VEMCO pulse position modulation acoustic telemetry monitoring equipment

Background: False-positive data (better known as "false detections") in VEMCO VR2 acoustic telemetry monitoring studies that use pulse position modulation coding can cause biased or erroneous outcomes in data analysis. To understand the occurrence of false detections in acoustic monitoring data sets, the results of a range test experiment using eight acoustic receivers and 12 transmitters were examined. Results: One hundred and fifty one tag ID codes were recorded, 137 of which were identified as likely from false detections, 12 were from test tags, and two were from tagged sharks. False detections accounted for < 0.05 % of detections (918) in the experiment. False detection tag ID codes were not randomly distributed amongst the available codes, being more likely to occur at IDs close to tags used in the experiment. Receivers located near the bottom recorded the most false detections and tag ID codes from false detections. Receivers at the same depth did not differ significantly in the mean number of daily false detections. The daily number of false detections recorded by a receiver did not conform to a random pattern, and was not strongly correlated with daily receiver performance. Conclusions: In an era of increasing data sharing and public storage of scientific data, the occurrence of false detections is of significant concern and the results of this study demonstrate that while rare they do occur and can be identified and accounted for in analyses

Continental-scale animal tracking reveals functional movement classes across marine taxa

Acoustic telemetry is a principle tool for observing aquatic animals, but coverage over large spatial scales remains a challenge. To resolve this, Australia has implemented the Integrated Marine Observing System's Animal Tracking Facility which comprises a continental-scale hydrophone array and coordinated data repository. This national acoustic network connects localized projects, enabling simultaneous monitoring of multiple species over scales ranging from 100 s of meters to 1000 s of kilometers. There is a need to evaluate the utility of this national network in monitoring animal movement ecology, and to identify the spatial scales that the network effectively operates over. Cluster analyses assessed movements and residency of 2181 individuals from 92 species, and identified four functional movement classes apparent only through aggregating data across the entire national network. These functional movement classes described movement metrics of individuals rather than species, and highlighted the plasticity of movement patterns across and within populations and species. Network analyses assessed the utility and redundancy of each component of the national network, revealing multiple spatial scales of connectivity influenced by the geographic positioning of acoustic receivers. We demonstrate the significance of this nationally coordinated network of receivers to better reveal intra-specific differences in movement profiles and discuss implications for effective management

A standardised framework for analysing animal detections from automated tracking arrays

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.Background: Over the past 15 years, the integration of localised passive telemetry networks into centralised data repositories has greatly enhanced our ability to monitor the presence and movements of highly mobile and migratory species. These large-scale networks are now generating big data, allowing meta-analyses across multiple species, locations, and temporal scales. Broad-scale comparisons of animal movement metrics are constrained by the use of diverse analytical techniques among researchers. Accordingly, there is a need for a tool-set to assist in calculating animal movement metrics that can be easily applied to datasets from local studies to large-scale cooperative networks. Results: We present a standardised framework and an associated analysis tool-set that facilitates the calculation of a range of activity space and movement metrics for passive telemetry datasets. Application of the tool-set is demonstrated using data from the Integrated Marine Observing System continental-scale network of underwater acoustic receivers. We show how the metrics can: (1) be directly compared among multiple species monitored at multiple sites; (2) be compared among multiple species tagged at a single study site; and (3) assess changes in activity space metrics over time. Conclusions: Establishing a framework and tool-set to analyse data from large-scale networks progresses the field of passive telemetry beyond the traditional individual-, species-, or location-centric approaches to facilitate national- or international-scale outputs that better address important questions in the field of movement ecology.Integrated Marine Observing Syste

Data Descriptor: Australia’s continental-scale acoustic tracking database and its automated quality control process

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ applies to the metadata files made available in this article.Our ability to predict species responses to environmental changes relies on accurate records of animal movement patterns. Continental-scale acoustic telemetry networks are increasingly being established worldwide, producing large volumes of information-rich geospatial data. During the last decade, the Integrated Marine Observing System’s Animal Tracking Facility (IMOS ATF) established a permanent array of acoustic receivers around Australia. Simultaneously, IMOS developed a centralised national database to foster collaborative research across the user community and quantify individual behaviour across a broad range of taxa. Here we present the database and quality control procedures developed to collate 49.6 million valid detections from 1891 receiving stations. This dataset consists of detections for 3,777 tags deployed on 117 marine species, with distances travelled ranging from a few to thousands of kilometres. Connectivity between regions was only made possible by the joint contribution of IMOS infrastructure and researcher-funded receivers. This dataset constitutes a valuable resource facilitating meta-analysis of animal movement, distributions, and habitat use, and is important for relating species distribution shifts with environmental covariates

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Учебная программа учреждения высшего образования по учебной дисциплине иностранный язык- 1(английский) для специальности -1-960101 "Таможенное дело". УД - 2199/р 4 курс 7 семестр

<div><p>Accurately quantifying animals’ spatial utilisation is critical for conservation, but has long remained an elusive goal due to technological impediments. The Argos telemetry system has been extensively used to remotely track marine animals, however location estimates are characterised by substantial spatial error. State-space models (SSM) constitute a robust statistical approach to refine Argos tracking data by accounting for observation errors and stochasticity in animal movement. Despite their wide use in ecology, few studies have thoroughly quantified the error associated with SSM predicted locations and no research has assessed their validity for describing animal movement behaviour. We compared home ranges and migratory pathways of seven hawksbill sea turtles (<em>Eretmochelys imbricata</em>) estimated from (a) highly accurate Fastloc GPS data and (b) locations computed using common Argos data analytical approaches. Argos 68^th percentile error was <1 km for LC 1, 2, and 3 while markedly less accurate (>4 km) for LC ≤0. Argos error structure was highly longitudinally skewed and was, for all LC, adequately modelled by a Student’s <em>t</em> distribution. Both habitat use and migration routes were best recreated using SSM locations post-processed by re-adding good Argos positions (LC 1, 2 and 3) and filtering terrestrial points (mean distance to migratory tracks ± SD = 2.2±2.4 km; mean home range overlap and error ratio  = 92.2% and 285.6 respectively). This parsimonious and objective statistical procedure however still markedly overestimated true home range sizes, especially for animals exhibiting restricted movements. Post-processing SSM locations nonetheless constitutes the best analytical technique for remotely sensed Argos tracking data and we therefore recommend using this approach to rework historical Argos datasets for better estimation of animal spatial utilisation for research and evidence-based conservation purposes.</p> </div

Joint log-likelihood surface plots for <i>t</i> distribution parameters τ and ν, for the longitude and latitude components of error.

<p>Argos location classes are indicated in the lower right corner of each panel. Maximum likelihood estimates are represented by filled circles. The 95% confidence region on each panel is indicated in gray and delimitated by a thick black line. The contour interval is -1 with log-likelihood values decreasing from the maximum likelihood point estimate.</p

Mean HRA index (error ratio/overlaying percentage) associated to individual and combined inter-nesting home range estimates using Argos-derived locations.

<p>50% and 95% UD refer to the core area of activity and overall home range respectively. Values in bold highlight the best refining approach for each Argos-based home range estimate.</p

High-resolution movements of critically endangered hawksbill turtles help elucidate conservation requirements in northern Australia

Despite being critically endangered, the at-sea behaviour of hawksbill turtles (Eretmochelys imbricata) remains insufficiently understood to support a global conservation strategy. Habitat location and spatial use are poorly documented, which is particularly true for the globally important Australian hawksbill population. We equipped 10 adult female hawksbill turtles nesting on Groote Eylandt, northern Australia, with Fastloc GPS and Argos satellite transmitters. We quantified fine-scale habitat use and area-restricted search behaviour, and located potential feeding and developmental habitats by simulating hatchling turtle dispersal patterns by using a particle-tracking hydrological model. During the breeding season, females mostly remained near their nesting site. Post-breeding, all turtles migrated to foraging sites on the Australian continental shelf, primarily in the Gulf of Carpentaria in coastal seagrass pastures, but also offshore near coral-reef platforms. The distribution of adult foraging grounds was similar to simulated dispersal patterns of hatchling turtles from distant rookeries, thus highlighting the ecological significance of the Gulf of Carpentaria for hawksbill turtles. Although this hawksbill turtle population is likely to be endemic to Australian waters, national and international conservation initiatives are required to mitigate sources of anthropogenic mortality (e.g. illegal tortoise-shell trade, incidental captures in fishing gear, marine debris, seabed mining exploitation)

Combined 50% and 95% utilisation distribution (UD) contour polygon calculated for each Argos-based approach compared to GPS estimates.

<p>The core GPS area (50% UD) and overall home range (95% UD) are delimitated by a red and orange line respectively. Argos-based 50 and 95% UD polygons are coloured in dark and light blue respectively. (A) Argos, (B) filtered Argos, (C) SSM, (D) post-processed SSM, (E) filtered SSM.</p