MoveTraits databank

Database accompanying the article"MoveTraits - A Database for Integrating Animal Behaviour Into Trait-Based Ecology" (2026) Ecology LettersBeumer LT, Hertel AG, Royauté R, Tucker MA, Albrecht J, Beltran RS, Cagnacci F, Davidson SC, Dejid N, Kays R, Kölzsch A, Lohr A, Neuschulz EL, Safi K, Scharf AK, Schleuning M, Wikelski M, Mueller Thttps://doi.org/10.1111/ele.70297We present a proof-of-concept ‘MoveTraits’ database with 52 mammal and 92 bird species sources from open access datasets on movebank and a large open access dataset of terrestrial mammal movements published alongside Tucker et al (2023) https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abo6499 which can be downloaded here: https://zenodo.org/records/7704108. The database contains 5 movement traits across multiple time scales: displacement distance, maximum displacement, range size (MCP), intensity of use (IoU), and diurnality.
MoveTraits provides movement trait data at three hierarchical levels: (1) summarised at the species level, facilitating interoperability with other species-level trait databases (files "MoveTrait.v0.1_species.sum_20251011" in file format rds and csv), (2) summarised at the individual level for studies on between-individual variation (files "MoveTrait.v0.1_individual.sum_20251011" in file format rds and csv), and (3) the underlying repeated movement trait estimates for each individual over time to allow for research questions at the intra-individual level (file "MoveTrait.v0.1_withinindividual_20251011" nested dataframe only available in rds format). We summarised the underlying repeated movement trait estimates at the individual level as mean, median, coefficient of variation, and 5th as well as 95th percentile and provided species means of centrality and variance (e.g., the mean species 95th percentile summarized from individual 95th percentiles for a given trait).Data owners contributing their data to the database are listed in Table S3.Code to reproduce the database version 0.1 can be found under the Open Science Framework (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/SP8Z6).We encourage MoveTraits data users to also cite the original datasets if they only use a subset of the MoveTraits data, for example data for a specific species.

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