Managing Grizzly Bear Data at the Foothills Research Institute

database schema

Paper and presentation for the ESRI 2009 International User Conference, San Diego, California

Abstract

The Foothills Research Institute Grizzly Bear Program (formerly the Foothills Model Forest Grizzly Bear Research Program) has passed its tenth year of grizzly bear research in Alberta, Canada. The Foothills Research Institute is a non-profit organization that works to advance the goal of sustainable resource management through on-the-ground research. The Grizzly Bear Program has grown to include many multi-disciplinary research teams to study the health, population, habitat and movement of grizzly bears. Many data management and processing techniques have evolved to more efficiently handle the growing collection of raw data. These include: an improved centralized database structure that will accommodate similar data from various sources outside our organization; a more comprehensive database to store all the DNA and genetics information; and the conversion of telemetry data processing scripts originally written in AML to python with easily accessible tools for the user.

View paper online.

Presentation Topics

  1. Overview of the Foothills Research Institute
  2. Grizzly Bear Program Overview
  3. Data Management
    • Database design changes
    • Including genetic data
  4. Handling Telemetry Data
    • Transition from AML to python