The MegaMove Steering Committee members Dr Sequeira, Prof Harcourt, Prof David Sims, and Dr Victor Eguíluz, were awarded a prestigious Discovery Project grant by the Australian Research Council.
This grant focuses on the dynamic assessment of threats to marine megafauna in face of global change and will be aiming to develop a global approach to synthesise global tracking datasets and deliver near real-time diagnostics on risks by:
- initialising the process of biologging data standardisation at global scale to expedite the use of existing data to address fundamental questions needed to inform conservation management, and
- developing big data science approaches to reveal movement properties and identify patterns in tracking data that correspond to social, collective, or coordinated behaviour.
Outcomes will demonstrate how big data in marine telemetry can be synthesised and translated into ecologically significant behaviours, important to understanding how global change may affect charismatic and threatened species. Additionally, data standardisation is essential to facilitate uptake for dynamic near real-time assessments, as well as the integration of tracking data in the global ocean observing systems (GOOS).
Through this project, we aim to push forward a new frontier in dynamic marine spatial management to improve conservation through implementation of standardisation framework to create a tool for dynamic prediction of marine megafauna occurrence, ecologically significant areas, and risk mapping at global scale.
