Background – The Atlantic Cooperative Telemetry Network

The collaboration that became the ACT Network can be traced back to September 27th, 2005 in Alexandria, VA. During an Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission – Atlantic Sturgeon Technical Committee meeting, it became apparent that several researchers were using acoustic telemetry, but their findings were spatially limited, bounded by their individual arrays. Tom Savoy (Connecticut Departmental of Energy and Environmental Protection) and Dewayne Fox (Delaware State University) volunteered to lead a data sharing effort. That evening, Savoy and Fox met to discuss how a collaboration of this nature would look – and what would they call it? Savoy and Fox settled on the Atlantic Cooperative Telemetry Network, or ACT for short.

At the start, ACT was a simple spreadsheet that Savoy sent out once or twice a year with a focus on Atlantic sturgeon. As word spread and more researchers wanted to reap the benefits of this collaboration, the complexity and workload for Savoy soared. Savoy and Fox decided that they could no longer handle things with a simple spreadsheet as the network kept growing. They solicited advice on data sharing and management from John Manderson (OpenOcean Research- retired NOAA-NMFS). Afterwards, they secured funding to support the development of the ACT Network through a NOAA-NMFS Section 6 award and hired Lori Brown as Network Manager. With Brown’s help, ACT continued to grow.

In April 2020, the MATOS data portal was launched through support from MARACOOS, NOAA Chesapeake Bay Office, the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) Animal Telemetry Network (ATN), Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) . MATOS is a web-based tool for researchers and natural resource professionals of the ACT Network to submit acoustic telemetry data for cross matching between projects. MATOS allows researchers to upload data and corresponding metadata to the password-protected ACT_MATOS node, which is compatible with the Ocean Tracking Network (OTN) parent node. Data submitted to the ACT_MATOS node, through the MATOS data portal, are cross matched between other regional OTN-compatible nodes and data are subsequently shared with users (tag and array owners) who subscribe to the OTN-compatible database management system.

The ACT founders couldn’t imagine how great ACT would become over the next couple of decades. The ACT Network is currently composed of 215 members from 106 organizations who lead 165 projects tracking 11,534 individuals from 72 species. The network database has 2,300 receiver stations and hosts data from several glider missions. This collaborative receiver array has recorded over 50 million detections since its establishment in 2005. However, only about half of these detections have been matched to tag owners. If you deployed acoustic transmitters in the northwestern Atlantic Ocean and you are not a member one of the regional collaborative networks (FACT, ACT, or OTN), you could have detections waiting for you in the ACT database! Join us and contribute to the collaborative acoustic telemetry community.