University of Montana Research Essential to Global Arctic Animal Migration Archive

Researchers from around the world, including the University of Montana, have long observed the movements and behavior of animals in the Arctic, but have had difficulty discovering and accessing data. To solve the problem, an international team led by Sarah Davidson, data curator at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Radolfzell, Germany, and Gil Bohrer, professor at Ohio State University, established the global data archive for studies of animal migration in the Arctic and sub-Arctic. It currently contains over 200 projects and movement data of more than 8,000 marine and terrestrial animals from 1991 to the present.

The archive, hosted on the Max Planck Institute’s Movebank platform and funded by NASA, helps scientists share their knowledge and collaborate on questions on how animals are responding to a changing Arctic – particularly important because the Arctic region extends around the world. Researchers from more 100 universities, government agencies and conservation groups across 17 countries are involved in the archive.

UM contributors include Professor Mark Hebblewhite, graduate student Stephen Lewis and former postdoctoral researcher Eliezer Gurarie. Their research is part of Hebblewhite’s funded NASA Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment project that studies the effects of rapid climate change on wildlife in the Arctic, with a focus on caribou.

“UM has a long history, pioneered by researcher Steve Running, of understanding consequences of climate change to ecosystems, and this work builds on this important legacy in a region of the world undergoing some of the fastest rates of climate change, fires and impacts on people and nature,” said Hebblewhite, who studies ungulate habitat ecology.

Three recent studies from the archive reveal large-scale patterns in the behaviors of golden eagles, bears, caribou, moose and wolves in the region and illustrate how the archive can be used to recognize larger ecosystem changes. The results were published Nov. 6 in an article in Science, one of world’s premier scientific journals.

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