E-Ecology GPS Bird Track Generator

The FlySafe GPS bird tracks service

!!!Under Construction (04-05-09)!!!

One of the data types available in the FlySafe database is GPS tracks. These are produced by attaching small GPS tracking sensors to birds, which track the bird movements throughout the year. The data is subsequently collected by the Argos satellite system, and made available in the FlySafe Database. The data itself is geo-referenced, and as such it makes sense to provide a service that allows you to look at the data in a GIS-system. The GIS system of choice is Google Earth, and therefor the output of the service is a KML file. This KML file can be loaded into Google Earth, but many other GIS-systems also provide KML reading capabilities.

The service itself can be found at the Flysafe website, or with a direct link to the GPS service. Both do require special access: You need to have credentials and your IP address should be registered.

The Interface

Currently there are 40 different birds available in the database, and records exist from June 2006 and on. In order to be able to select specific bird and time for detailed studying, an interface was built that allows users to query and retrieve specified subsets of the available data. See GPS_interface_screenshot1.png at the right for a

Visualization

There are several option for the visualization of the bird measurements:

• Color

Underlying Query and Data

The data in the database

 SELECT g.ptt_id, i.species, g.date_time, g.latitude, g.longitude, g.speed, g.course, g.altitude,
   g.alt_status, g.quality, g.user_qc, g.parser_qc, g."location", elevation.srtm_getvalue(g."location") 
   AS elevation, case when g.altitude = 0 then NULL else (g.altitude - elevation.srtm_getvalue(g."location")) end AS agl 
   FROM gps.gps_tracking_data g, gps.individual i, gps.track_session t 
   WHERE g.ptt_id = t.ptt_id AND g.date_time >= t.start_date 
   AND i.ring_number = t.ring_number AND g.parser_qc = 1 AND g.ptt_id = <ptt_id>
   AND g.date_time >= <startTime> AND g.date_time <= <endTime> 
   AND g.latitude <> 0 ORDER BY g.date_time