ETN Virtual Research Environment

This online and interactive environment provides access to all data of the European Tracking Network. The VRE includes a database for storage and integration of acoustic telemetry data and a number of analytical tools for analysing the data using R that are:

- the LifeWatch Data Explorer for fish telemetry, a RShiny GUI for data exploration;

- an RStudio IDE that allows the user to develop and run R scripts online on the available telemetry data;

- an Rpackage that incorporates specific functions to start a smooth analysis of telemetry data.

The ETN data management platform is an online web application to store, access and share aquatic telemetry data and metadata. The portal is open to all European users for data management of telemetry data in marine, estuarine and freshwater environments. ETN now contains data of 15 fish species. Currently ETN supports acoustic telemetry data, but aims to extend this to different telemetry techniques (e.g. PIT data-storage tags and satellite tags) to be able to monitor habitat use and migration patterns of a range of species in the aquatic environment.

On a technical note, the portal requires the receiver and deployment metadata, as well as the transmitter tag and animal metadata before detection data can be uploaded. The uploaded data are subjected to quality control. Access is password protected and data moratorium rules are in place.

The ETN data portal is developed by the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) as part of the Flemish contribution to LifeWatch. New developments and additional features are added on a continuous basis. The web application is built using PHP (using the Symfony framework) for the back-end side and Bootstrap/jQuery/Datatables/… (among others) to facilitate the development of the front-end side.

Date ( Creation): 2021-01-05

Date ( Publication): 2021-01-05

Status: On going / operational

Point of contact

Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) - Jan Reubens

Keywords: animal biologging

Keywords: acoustic telemetry

Keywords: data explorer

Keywords: data analysis

Keywords: data visualization

Keywords: Aquatic

Keywords: Animal Tracking Data

Keywords: Fish

Access constraints: License

Use limitation: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Other constraints: Part of the data is restricted (until 4 years after data collection).

OnLine resource: VRE access (
WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link
)

OnLine resource: ETN data management platform (
WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link
)

Service Name: ETN VRE access

Service Description: Access to the ETN-VRE, the included analytical tools and data.

Service Reference (id): https://europeantrackingnetwork.org/en/virtual-research-environment

Service Name: ETN data management platform

Service Description: Application to store, access and share aquatic telemetry data and metadata

Service Reference (id): http://www.lifewatch.be/etn/

Service Name: etn R package

Service Description: This package provides functionality to access data from the European Tracking Network (ETN) database hosted by the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) as part of the Flemish contribution to LifeWatch. ETN data is subject to the ETN data policy and can be:

- restricted: under moratorium and only accessible to logged-in data owners/collaborators

- unrestricted: publicly accessible without login and routinely published to international biodiversity facilities

The ETN infrastructure currently requires the package to be run within the LifeWatch.be RStudio server, which is password protected. A login can be requested at http://www.lifewatch.be/etn/contact.

Service Reference (id): https://metadatacatalogue.lifewatch.eu/geonetwork/srv/eng/catalog.search#/metadata/e845bfe9-5d1f-42cf-a135-720a4ec07f95

How to cite this VRE: Flanders Marine Institute (2021). Europen Tracking Network Virtual Research Environment. Funded by the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) as part of the Belgian contribution to LifeWatch. Available at: https://europeantrackingnetwork.org/en/virtual-research-environment.