How to register your project

Join researchers in your region and around the world in developing a comprehensive network of telemetrists.

The Ocean Tracking Network (OTN) is committed to making animal tracking data more accessible while respecting the intellectual property rights of its collaborators. We help make the general information you provide publicly accessible on the OTN data portal for the purposes of properly classifying and advertising your project or study. Associated tag metadata and animal detection data remain your intellectual property. You control who has access to your data.

For more information, please read the complete OTN data policy.

OTN requests specific information about your project and tagged animals so that your research is visible to potential collaborators and is consistent with both OTN and international telemetry data standards.

Register your project

Ready to add your project to OTN’s global network? Please follow the steps below:

1. Provide background information: Collaborate with OTN by submitting your project’s metadata. Fill out the template here and email to otndc@dal.ca with the subject ‘New project metadata’.

• This information will be used to generate your public discovery page on the data portal website.
• You will be provided with a private repository folder where metadata sheets can be uploaded and where OTN will add detection extract files—these are created by cross-referencing tags to detections across all OTN-reported projects.

2. Submit your tagging information: Once OTN has your project’s metadata you can add information about your tagged animals to the tagging metadata template. This information will be used to attribute detections of your tags to your project. To assist OTN with quality control and sensor detection resolution, you should also complete an authorization form for the manufacturer of you tags (e.g., the Innovasea or Thelma Biotel authorization forms). These forms can be added to your data portal repository folder or emailed to otndc@dal.ca.

3. Submit your receiver information: To complete the full picture for your telemetry project, report all instrument deployments and collected data detection files to OTN. The instrument metadata template is here. The collected detections will be cross-referenced with all tags in the database. This data can be added to your data portal repository folder or emailed to otndc@dal.ca.

Keep your project up to date

In order to ensure that the OTN database continues to hold accurate information about you and your project, it is important to keep your project records up to date.

This includes:

• Tagging metadata
• Instrument deployment metadata
• Raw, unedited instrument detection files

Please report new developments regularly by uploading new files into your repository folder on the OTN data portal, or by emailing otndc@dal.ca