The recording of animal movement patterns has become an essential aspect in conservation biology and research. For instance for the prediction of changing environments or natural disasters.
Movebank is a freely accessible database of animal movements for everyone, hosted by the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior.
With its help scientists around the globe can publish, share and analyse their data. Sensitive data can be stored securely and protected from unauthorized access.
Animal tags record complex movements and environmental data and transmit the results to mobile devices, via the mobile network or via the ISS to connected data centers (see ICARUS) and finally to Movebank.
Mobile devices enable researchers to query the movement data in the field and analyse it immediately, e.g. via Firetail.
Movebank today holds 11.8 billion locations and 9.5 billion other sensor records from more than 10,000 studies of over 1,700 taxa (as of October 2026, movebank.org).
Our contribution
Schäuffelhut Berger cooperates closely with the researchers of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior to adapt the software infrastructure to an increasing number of challenges, to develop interfaces and to enable smooth data transition during daily operation.
ICARUS
Our work on the ICARUS project has a page of its own: ICARUS.
Cooperation
Team meeting at the Bio-logging Symposium 2017
From our blog
- Big Data (2019)
- Modern animal tracking: the Movebank newsletter (2022)
- Global Animal Migration (2022)
- Basics of Animal Tracking Databases (2025)
- Basics of Animal Tracking Databases: Crafting the Schema (2025)
More Movebank posts from 2015–2018 are in German on the German blog.