Tagged Tiger Sharks: Spatial Distribution
Tagged Tiger Sharks: Spatial Distribution
Posted March 11, 2013Voyager’s “fish & wildlife” category now includes a spatial distribution map for tiger sharks in Hawaiʻi. This overlay represents the aggregated locations of twelve individual sharks tagged with sensors whose positions were communicated via satellite and tracked over time: five from the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands in 2006 and seven from the Main Hawaiian Islands in 2009. As we receive data from other deployments, we will continue to supplement the existing overlay with additional coordinates.
The Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa deploys satellite tags on tiger sharks to track their movements. Top predators play an important role in ecosystems by influencing prey behavior and shaping communities through trophic cascades. For more information, please visit Carl Meyer and Kim Holland’s Shark Research page at HIMB.
We have also implemented a couple of improvements to this and other fish and wildlife distribution maps within Voyager. Most notably, the pop-up window that appears when clicking on one of the map icons (see example above) now includes links for viewing the current map extent in either Google Earth (KMZ) or as a PNG image using Web Map Service (WMS). These interoperable Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards will help users who may want to incorporate these layers into other mapping applications: WMS GetCapabilities.
