MoveTraits – A cross-taxonomic database for standardized movement metrics

Behavior is the key mechanism through which animals interact with their environment and respond to environmental change. Movement is a fundamental aspect of animal behavior, operating across multiple scales - from fine-scale local movements to long-distance migrations. Thereby, movement underpins key ecological processes of importance for (meta-)community dynamics and ecosystem functioning, such as seed dispersal, nutrient transfer, disease dynamics, and trophic interactions. Animal movement provides “mobile links” between habitats and therefore plays an integral role for ecosystem function and biodiversity. Evidence for human impacts on animal movement behavior is abundant but is currently not well integrated into policy assessments, despite its central role for biodiversity. Over the past decade, several community efforts have emerged to archive animal movement data. Yet, raw movement data are difficult to interpret and to compare for conservation practitioners and policymakers. In addition, only a fraction of archived data are currently openly accessible. We here introduce a new database – MoveTraits – that extracts a suite of standardized and comparable measures of animal movement behavior from data stored in community repositories. MoveTraits currently provides five simple but widely used traits – from displacement distance to range size – at time scales varying from hourly to annually. Movement traits are annotated with individual level metadata and shared as within-individual repeated measures, as well as individual- and species-level summaries. MoveTraits currently encompasses movement traits for 52 mammal and 97 bird species. We envision that MoveTraits will grow alongside repositories and facilitate access to informative animal movement behaviors derived from movement data, while restricting access to the original data when necessary. Movement traits have potential to improve trait-based global change predictions and contribute to global biodiversity assessments as Essential Biodiversity Variables. By making animal movement data more accessible and interpretable, this database could bridge the gap between movement ecology and biodiversity policy, facilitating evidence-based conservation.