Movebank Projects

Loading Movebank projects

Movebank data by …

To access data from Movebank you must register for a movebank account.

  1. Then, within Firetail use one of
  • File > Download Data by Tag ID
  • File > Download Data by Individual ID
  • File > Download Data by Deployment ID

to create a local project snapshot in $USER\movebank_data and enable the annotation feature

  1. A window will prompt you to enter your Movebank credentials. You may select to save your credentials within Firetail.

movebank credentials

  1. a list of studies will open, select a study containing supported data

Hint: start typing the name to quickly jump to a study of interest with the same prefix Use the quick search window to search for substrings.

Note: the study must contain valid GPS or acceleration data

  1. Depending on (download by) tag, individual or deployment ID you are the asked to select a study item of this category.

Use the quick search window to search for substrings.

  1. Select one and Hit OK to start the download
  2. Select the time range you wish to download

movebank range download

  • select Download Complete Data to download the complete data set
  • select Download Updates to retrieve all data tagged as update in movebank (Full License Only)
  • select Download Restricted by Date Range to subsets of the dataset (Full License Only)

You will be prompted to open the data set directly, yet it is possible to access any time later on via File > Open Downloaded Data.

download movebank data

The quick filter box allows you to filter the listed studies/tags or individuals on the fly. If upper- and lowercase matters, check the match case checkbox.

download movebank data

Local movebank projects

Firetail can open Movebank data from

via File > Open CSV File(s).

Most column definitions following the Movebank standards can be imported as well as several raw tag data or custom tag formats. In particular, Firetail should process location data, acceleration data and event based sensor data from a wide range of sources.

See Tag Vendors