Mission Statement

The Movebank Data Repository is designed for long-term preservation of animal-borne sensor data. These data represent unique observations of animal movements and behavior, and their internal conditions and external environment, that can never be reproduced, and should remain available to the public and research community into the future. The Repository is implemented as an archiving service of the Movebank platform hosted by the Communication, Information, Media Centre (KIM) of the University of Konstanz. The Repository complements Movebank’s flexible tools for sharing, managing and analyzing data throughout all stages of research by providing a way to formally publish and provide persistent access to research datasets. Datasets are harmonized through submission through Movebank, go through a review and curation process, and are made publicly available.

The Repository supports the goals of Movebank by enabling formal archiving and open access to data to preserve knowledge for future generations.

The Repository supports data authors by increasing the visibility and public value of their work, providing a service to fulfill data-sharing requirements and data management plans, and enabling recognition through citation.

The Repository supports data users by providing a source of diverse, reusable data in a consistent format for exploration, education, public outreach, large-scale assessments, models, and tools.


The Repository also strives toward the FAIR Principles to make data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable:

  • Findability: Data are assigned DOIs for unique and persistent identification and described with metadata. DOIs and metadata are published by DataCite, allowing wide discoverability.
  • Accessibility: Data and metadata are publicly accessible online and using publicly documented APIs. No registration or authentication is required to access the repository contents.
  • Interoperable: Published metadata relies on common metadata standards, and published data uses the Movebank vocabulary, published at http://vocab.nerc.ac.uk/collection/MVB.
  • Reuseable: Data are published under a Creative Commons Zero license to enable future reuse. Review and curation ensure that data are understandable, and metadata and readme files link to written documents describing the data.

    • This mission statement was approved by Petra Hätscher, Director of the Communication, Information, Media Centre (KIM) of the University of Konstanz on 25.03.2021.