IMOS - Animal Tracking Facility - Acoustic Tracking - Quality Controlled Summarised Detections (2007 - ongoing)

Updated: 2026-05-08

Since 2007, the Integrated Marine Observing System’s Animal Tracking Facility (formerly known as the Australian Animal Tracking And Monitoring System (AATAMS)) has established a permanent array of acoustic receivers around Australia to detect the movements of tagged marine animals in coastal waters. Simultaneously, the Animal Tracking Facility developed a centralised national database (https://animaltracking.aodn.org.au/) to encourage collaborative research across the Australian research community and provide unprecedented opportunities to monitor broad-scale animal movements. The resulting dataset comprises observations of tagged animals in Australian waters collected by IMOS infrastructure as well as receivers operated by independent research projects and organisations. This dataset constitutes a valuable resource facilitating meta-analysis of animal movement, distributions, and habitat use, and is important for relating species distribution shifts with environmental covariates. This dataset comprises all available (2007 – ongoing) quality-controlled and publicly accessible animal detections collected across the collaborative, continental IMOS network for a range of aquatic species (fish, sharks, rays, reptiles, and mammals). Here, raw animal detections collated via the IMOS Australian Animal Acoustic Telemetry Database have been quality-controlled as per Hoenner et al. (2018). This dataset is updated on a six-monthly basis. While the complete quality-controlled dataset is available here (https://catalogue-imos.aodn.org.au/geonetwork/srv/api/records/541d4f15-122a-443d-ab4e-2b5feb08d6a0), this dataset provides a summarised version. All detections have been aggregated with hourly resolution at the receiver and animal levels. For animals carrying multi-sensor transmitters (i.e. temperature, pressure or accelerometer), their corresponding mean hourly values are also provided at the receiver level. The total number of hourly detections in each receiver is also provided for each animal.