EO4wildlife platform case study: Assessing marine mammal habitat preferences to inform conservation and management

Decision-making in today’s contentious world requires high quality data and tools that are trusted by a wide range of stakeholders. New and evolving technologies provide managers/scientists with the potential to bring such... [ view full abstract ]

Decision-making in today’s contentious world requires high quality data and tools that are trusted by a wide range of stakeholders. New and evolving technologies provide managers/scientists with the potential to bring such data and decision tools into Marine Protected Area (MPA) discussions, hopefully reducing the cycle of disagreement and stalemate that characterize many forums. The easy-to-use EO4wildlife platform will allow querying, searching, mining and extracting information from different databanks (i.e. owner database, archive database and online database). Scientists or MPAs managers will be able to fusion and cross correlate heterogeneous data via advanced data analytics tools in order to discover patterns, validate or invalidate hypothesis, detect potential similar or reproducible behaviour or favourable conditions associated to the movement of animals (i.e. GPS and Argos data) or any kind of geo localized data (i.e. transects surveys). This platform will facilitate obtaining, visualizing and sharing extracted Earth Observation data that will be used to better understand the environmental factors that may influence the distribution and habitat preferences of tracked/surveyed species in order to better identify and predict important marine mammal areas (IMMAs).