Advances in GPS and GSM technologies have opened possibilities in the field of movement ecology. Now vast amounts of data are being collected to track animal movements with the aim of answering fundamental questions related to animal behavior. As miniaturization and the efficiency of electronic components improves additional sensors can begin to be coupled with the GPS tracking to enable features related to the animal’s state at a given position to be recorded.
New devices incorporate accelerometer and other sensors to enable classification of the behavior of the animals they tracked. Websites such as Movebank.org struggle to visualize the quantity of data points involved in some data sets and they do not currently support visualization or analysis of data from other sensors such as accelerometers or heart-rate loggers.
The hardware is becoming available but there is a need for software to display the large multisensory data sets that are now being produced and will inevitably become more prevalent in the future. This software is of paramount importance to enable researchers to analyze and visualize their data. This is especially relevant to understand how environmental conditions may affect the movement decisions of birds and the energetics of flight under changing environmental variables.