The Arctic and Central Alaska Inventory & Monitoring networks collaborated with the Alaska Region GIS team to develop a database for storing, managing and analyzing data from GPS collared wildlife. GPS collar data used to be overwhelmingly difficult to manage due to the sheer volume of data and processing involved. Seeing the need for a centralized data manageent solution Regan Sarwas, GIS Programmer with the Alaska Region and Scott Miller, Arctic and Central Alaska Networks Data Manager, conceived, designed and built the Animal Movement database which is currently being used to track wildlife movement across Alaska. GPS locations are transmitted from the GPS
collars to park biologists via a satellite network. The Animal Movement tool processes and inserts the GPS fixes into a Microsoft SQL Server database. After quality control procedures are run the data are available for analysis as a layer file which can be opened using ESRI ArcGIS software.

Published on Oct 16, 2012