Stephen Lewis sees a golden eagle flying over Mount Sentinel and feels the whole Arctic Circle exhale.
That eagle might be one he radio-collared while working in Alaska’s Denali National Park. The collar traces the bird’s migration path between the Arctic and the Lower 48 states. That trace entwines with about 50 other eagles the wildlife biologist has collared for his U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service study. And that study now joins hundreds of other research projects from around the planet in a new Arctic Animal Movement Archive.
When all those radio-collared eagles, caribou, whales, wolves and other critters get their travels animated on a computer map, it looks like the whole Northern Hemisphere is breathing in and out.
“I have a couple hundred-thousands of location points for eagles,” Lewis, who’s working on a doctorate degree at the University of Montana, told the Missoulian. “With the archive, we have millions of locations. Now you can ask these larger-scale questions and see bigger-scale changes. Over generations of eagles, that really leverages what you can do.”
The Arctic Animal Movement Archive project has 160 co-authors, including Lewis. At the bottom of the list is UM wildlife biologist Mark Hebblewhite.
What Hebblewhite, Lewis, and their 158 colleagues did was coalesce three decades’ worth of movement studies on 86 different animals from almost every nation with Arctic wildlife research activity. And they broke through the language and methodological boundaries so every study uses the same measuring sticks. Meters or feet, minutes or hours, Mongolian or American, any participating researcher can go to the archive and look for planetary patterns.
The archive goes live as climate researchers find increasing evidence that the Earth’s polar regions are warming almost twice as fast as lower latitudes. When the animal movements overlay climactic shifts over time, the scale of change is profound.
Lewis said having the Arctic Animal Movement Archive was like putting a book of his study into a global library of related material. His research on golden eagles revealed a lot about where they spend summers and winters, especially when combined with research from the international community around the Arctic Circle.
