IMOS Animal Tracking Acoustic Detections in Australian Waters

The Integrated Marine Observing System's Animal Tracking Facility provides quality-controlled acoustic detections of tagged marine animals across Australian coastal waters from 2007 onward. This dataset supports collaborative research on animal movements, distributions, and habitat use, and is updated every six months.

Use Cases

• Analyze broad-scale animal movement patterns based on acoustic detection data.
• Study habitat use and species distributions across Australian waters.
• Relate animal movement shifts to environmental covariates mentioned in the description.

Strengths

• Data spans from 2007 to the present, offering a long-term observational record.
• Quality-controlled according to a published methodology (Hoenner et al., 2018).
• Aggregated from a collaborative, continental network of receivers.

Limitations

• Column names and data structure are unknown, requiring inspection after download.
• The total number of rows and dataset size are unspecified.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to the IMOS receiver array around Australia.

Provenance

Source

Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) Animal Tracking Facility.

Collection Method

Acoustic detections collected by a permanent array of receivers and independent research projects.

Time Range

2007 – ongoing.

Freshness

Updated on a six-monthly basis; last metadata update was 2026-07-10.

Geography

Australian coastal waters.