Connecting the data landscape of long-term ecological studies:The SPI-Birds data hub

Culina, A. and Adriaensen, F. and Bailey, L.D. and Burgess, M.D. and Charmantier, A. and Cole, E.F. and Eeva, T. and Matthysen, E. and Nater, C.R. and Sheldon, B.C. and Sæther, B.-E. and Vriend, S.J.G. and Zajkova, Z. and Adamík, P. and Aplin, L.M. and Angulo, E. and Artemyev, A. and Barba, E. and Barišić, S. and Belda, E. and Bilgin, C.C. and Bleu, J. and Both, C. and Bouwhuis, S. and Branston, C.J. and Broggi, J. and Burke, T. and Bushuev, A. and Camacho, C. and Campobello, D. and Canal, D. and Cantarero, A. and Caro, S.P. and Cauchoix, M. and Chaine, A. and Cichoń, M. and Ćiković, D. and Cusimano, C.A. and Deimel, C. and Dhondt, A.A. and Dingemanse, N.J. and Doligez, B. and Dominoni, D.M. and Doutrelant, C. and Drobniak, S.M. and Dubiec, A. and Eens, M. and Einar Erikstad, K. and Espín, S. and Farine, D.R. and Figuerola, J. and Kavak Gülbeyaz, P. and Grégoire, A. and Hartley, I.R. and Hau, M. and Hegyi, G. and Hille, S. and Hinde, C.A. and Holtmann, B. and Ilyina, T. and Isaksson, C. and Iserbyt, A. and Ivankina, E. and Kania, W. and Kempenaers, B. and Kerimov, A. and Komdeur, J. and Korsten, P. and Král, M. and Krist, M. and Lambrechts, M. and Lara, C.E. and Leivits, A. and Liker, A. and Lodjak, J. and Mägi, M. and Mainwaring, M.C. and Mänd, R. and Massa, B. and Massemin, S. and Martínez-Padilla, J. and Mazgajski, T.D. and Mennerat, A. and Moreno, J. and Mouchet, A. and Nakagawa, S. and Nilsson, J.-Å. and Nilsson, J.F. and Cláudia Norte, A. and van Oers, K. and Orell, M. and Potti, J. and Quinn, J.L. and Réale, D. and Kristin Reiertsen, T. and Rosivall, B. and Russell, A.F. and Rytkönen, S. and Sánchez-Virosta, P. and Santos, E.S.A. and Schroeder, J. and Senar, J.C. and Seress, G. and Slagsvold, T. and Szulkin, M. and Teplitsky, C. and Tilgar, V. and Tolstoguzov, A. and Török, J. and Valcu, M. and Vatka, E. and Verhulst, S. and Watson, H. and Yuta, T. and Zamora-Marín, J.M. and Visser, M.E. (2021) Connecting the data landscape of long-term ecological studies:The SPI-Birds data hub. Journal of Animal Ecology, 90 (9). pp. 2147-2160. ISSN 0021-8790

Abstract

The integration and synthesis of the data in different areas of science is drastically slowed and hindered by a lack of standards and networking programmes. Long-term studies of individually marked animals are not an exception. These studies are especially important as instrumental for understanding evolutionary and ecological processes in the wild. Furthermore, their number and global distribution provides a unique opportunity to assess the generality of patterns and to address broad-scale global issues (e.g. climate change). To solve data integration issues and enable a new scale of ecological and evolutionary research based on long-term studies of birds, we have created the SPI-Birds Network and Database (www.spibirds.org)—a large-scale initiative that connects data from, and researchers working on, studies of wild populations of individually recognizable (usually ringed) birds. Within year and a half since the establishment, SPI-Birds has recruited over 120 members, and currently hosts data on almost 1.5 million individual birds collected in 80 populations over 2,000 cumulative years, and counting. SPI-Birds acts as a data hub and a catalogue of studied populations. It prevents data loss, secures easy data finding, use and integration and thus facilitates collaboration and synthesis. We provide community-derived data and meta-data standards and improve data integrity guided by the principles of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR), and aligned with the existing metadata languages (e.g. ecological meta-data language). The encouraging community involvement stems from SPI-Bird's decentralized approach: research groups retain full control over data use and their way of data management, while SPI-Birds creates tailored pipelines to convert each unique data format into a standard format. We outline the lessons learned, so that other communities (e.g. those working on other taxa) can adapt our successful model. Creating community-specific hubs (such as ours, COMADRE for animal demography, etc.) will aid much-needed large-scale ecological data integration. © 2020 The Authors. Journal of Animal Ecology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society