Remote sensing in support of endangered species management and animal movement research -The env-data tool pack

The movement of animals is strongly influenced by external factors in their surrounding environment such as weather, habitat types, and human land use. With advances in positioning and sensor technologies, it is now possible to capture animal locations at high spatial and temporal granularities. Likewise, modern space-based remote sensing technology provides us with an increasing access to large volumes of environmental data, some of which changes on an hourly basis. Environmental data are heterogeneous in source and format, and are usually obtained at different scales and granularities than movement data. Indeed, there remain scientific and technical challenges in developing linkages between the growing collections of animal movement data and the large repositories of heterogeneous remote sensing observations, as well as in the developments of new statistical and computational methods for the analysis of movement in its environmental context. These challenges include retrieval, indexing, efficient storage, data integration, and analytic techniques.