Bird Tracking
Information System

About Tracking Information System

Millions of birds travel from their northern breeding ground in autumn every year to avoid harsh winters and associated food shortages. Birds use their traditional routes or flyways to move to their southern wintering grounds in autumn and return to their breeding grounds at the onset of spring. Such annual migratory events bring several hundred thousand birds to countries which fall on the flyways and offer, feeding, resting opportunities in a generally protected environment. The United Arab Emirates lying at the North-south migration route attracts millions of migratory birds from the Palearctic every year. Understanding movement and migration of key species of birds is an important element of any bird conservation activity.

The successful capture and tagging of five greater flamingos at Abu Dhabi’s Al Wathba Wetland Reserve in November 2005 the first ever in the entire Arabian Peninsula generated widespread media and public interest. At the moment, 85 individual birds of 12 different species are monitored, including water birds such as crab plovers and crested terns, as well as a few raptors such as osprey, greater spotted eagles and Egyptian vultures.

Improvements in telemetry technology are allowing us to monitor animal movements with increasing accuracy, precision and frequency. The increased complexity of the data collections, however, demands additional software and programming skills to process, store and disseminate the datasets.

Bird Tracking Information system developed for the archiving, processing and sharing of telemetry data. System offer secure storage, multi-user support and analysis tools and are a step along the way to improving data access, long-term data preservation and science communication. While this software platform promote data sharing, access to the majority of the data and to the software behind these systems remains restricted.