| Summary: | Progress Code: completed Purpose These datasets and accompanying syntheses provide a greater understanding of fundamental ecosystem processes in the Southern Ocean, support modelling of predator distributions under future climate scenarios and create inputs that can be incorporated into decision making processes by management authorities. The Retrospective Analysis of Antarctic Tracking Data (RAATD) is a Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research (SCAR) project led jointly by the Expert Groups on Birds and Marine Mammals and Antarctic Biodiversity Informatics, and endorsed by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. The RAATD project team consolidated tracking data for multiple species of Antarctic meso- and top-predators to identify Areas of Ecological Significance. These datasets constitute the compiled tracking data from a large number of research groups that have worked in the Antarctic since the 1990s. This metadata record pertains to the "standardized" version of the data files. These files contain position estimates as provided by the original data collectors (generally, raw Argos or GPS locations, or estimated GLS locations). Original data files have been converted to a common format and quality-checking applied, but have not been further filtered or interpolated. Periods at the start or end of deployments were identified and discarded if there was evidence that location data during these periods did not represent the animals' at-sea movement. For example, tags may have been turned on early (thereby recording locations prior to their deployment on animals) or animals may have remained at the deployment site, e.g. the breeding colony, for an extended period at the start or end of the tag deployment. Some tracks also showed a marked deterioration in the frequency and quality (for PTTs) of location estimates near the end of a track. Such locations were visually identified based on maps of each track in conjunction with plots of location distance from deployment site ...
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