Biologging data associated with Wide-ranging, year-round breaching behaviour of basking sharks revealed by long-term biologging

Institute of Marine Research

This dataset contains high-resolution (0.2 Hz) biologging data collected with pop-up satellite archival tags (Wildlife Computers, miniPAT-348) externally deployed on four basking sharks (Cetorhinus maximus) in the Northeast Atlantic for a full year between 2022 and 2024. The data underpin the study: "Wide-ranging, year-round breaching behaviour of basking sharks revealed by long-term biologging". The data include georeferenced occurrence records and associated environmental and behavioural measurements (e.g., water temperature, depth, light intensity, triaxial acceleration). These data support analyses of seasonal and spatial patterns in breaching behaviour.

Basking sharks were equipped with pop-up satellite archival tags (Wildlife Computers, miniPAT-348). Physically recovered tags recorded water depth, temperature, light level, and triaxial acceleration at 0.2 Hz.

Location estimates were derived from a gridded hidden Markov model implemented in the R package HMMoce. This uses convoluted spatial likelihoods based on light level, bathymetry, sea surface temperature and ocean heat content with a diffusive movement kernel to generate daily posterior location probabilities and most probable tracks via the Viterbi algorithm. Position uncertainty was quantified using the x and y dimensions of the daily 95% Utilization Distribution contour as a bounding box.

Raw biologging data are included in the downloadable zipfile. please be cautious that the download file is huge (4GB) and will take a long time to download.

The dataset has been updated over time as outlined below. Each entry includes the version number, release date, type of change, and a short description.

Overview

This section explains attributes included in the original dataset. The availability of the attributes depends on the share policy. When "Minimum attributes" is selected, only date/time, lat/lon, species identification and group size are available. Should you need other attributes described here, you are encouraged to contact the data provider. When "All attributes" is selected, all attributes are available in download.

Attributes described below represent those in the original dataset provided by the provider.
All attributes are included in the downloadable file (CSV or ESRI File Geodatabase) for "Complete Set of Dataset".

Attributes in dataset

Attribute (table column)	Description
oid	Unique ID number (generated by OBIS-SEAMAP)
occurrenceid	Occurrence ID
organismid	Organism ID
basisofrecord	Basis of record (MachineObservation)
samplingprotocol	Sampling protocol (Pop-up Satellite Archival Tag)
eventdate	Date and time of occurrence
decimallatitude	Longitude at decimal degrees
decimallongitude	Latitude at decimal degrees
minimumdepthinmeters	Minimum depth in meters
maximumdepthinmeters	Maximum depth in meters
footprintwkt	Footprint WKT
taxonid	Taxon ID
scientificname	Scientific name
sp_tsn	Taxonomic Serial Number added by OBIS-SEAMAP
obs_count	Number of animal added by OBIS-SEAMAP (always 1)
kingdom	Kingdom
phylum	Phylum
class	Class
order_	Order
family	Family
genus	Genus
specificepithet	Specific epithet
temperature	Temperature in degree Celsius
light_intensity	Raw light sensor output from Wildlife Computers MiniPAT
acceleration_x_axis	raw accelerometer output (x-axis) from Wildlife Computers MiniPAT
acceleration_y_axis	raw accelerometer output (y-axis) from Wildlife Computers MiniPAT
acceleration_z_axis	raw accelerometer output (z-axis) from Wildlife Computers MiniPAT
geom	Geometry field added by OBIS-SEAMAP