Firetail at a glance
The key facts about Firetail in one place. Last checked: 12 November 2026. Questions in short form: see the FAQ.
- What it is
- Firetail is desktop software for visualising and analysing animal tracking data: GPS tracks together with acceleration, magnetometer and other sensor data, video and environmental layers.
- Made by
- Schäuffelhut Berger GmbH, Unterhaching, Germany.
- Not to be confused with
- FireTail (firetail.ai), an API and AI security company. The two are unrelated.
- Current version
- Firetail 15.0.1, released 17 September 2026 (changelog).
- Platforms
- Windows, macOS, Linux. One download for all editions.
- Written in
- C++. (Its predecessor, the Movebank Acceleration Viewer, was written in Java.)
- History
- Developed since 2014. Successor of the Movebank Acceleration Viewer (2011 to 2020), as Movebank states; Firetail opens the viewer's annotation files.
- Data sources
- Movebank (download studies and keep them up to date) and local files from e-obs, Ornitela, Vectronic, Technosmart, Telonics, Argos, AWT, Milsar, Lotek, Ecotone and OpenCollar tags; Movebank CSV, GPX, BORIS annotations (details).
- Main functions
- Map and sensor panels linked in time; behaviour annotation by hand; behaviour classification from acceleration with FireSOM, run from a dialog without programming; video synchronization; evaluation of annotations against ground truth (precision, recall); ODBA, IMU data, home ranges (KDE).
- Open source?
- No, closed-source commercial software. The manual documents the methods (for example the ODBA formula and FireSOM's features), annotations export as CSV, and each release can be cited by version.
- Wikidata
- wikidata.org/wiki/Q142125575
Editions and prices
| Edition | Price | Limits |
|---|---|---|
| Free Edition | free, no license needed | 100,000 GPS fixes, 1,000,000 sensor samples, 5 groupings, 2 months time range |
| Trial | free, 3 months | 25,000,000 GPS fixes, 100,000,000 sensor samples, all features |
| Full license | 699 EUR 1st year, 629 EUR 2nd year, 559 EUR from the 3rd; plus VAT where applicable | no data limit (the computer's memory sets the practical limit); updates and support included |
Details, feature comparison and volume discounts: Get Firetail.
What fits in the Free Edition
A sample is one point in time of an acceleration burst, i.e. one x/y/z triplet. How long 1,000,000 samples last depends on the recording schedule. For one animal, with settings from published studies:
| Recording setting | Source | Fits in 1 million samples |
|---|---|---|
| e-obs, 3.8 s bursts at 10.54 Hz (40 samples) every 5 minutes, 18 h a day | Flack et al. 2016, Science Advances (white storks) | about 116 days |
| 3 s bursts at 10 Hz (30 samples) every 6 minutes | Cunningham et al. 2022, Oecologia (geese) | about 139 days |
| Ornitela, 2 s bursts at 20 Hz (40 samples) after each GPS fix, every 15 minutes at full battery | de Jong et al. 2025, Behavioral Ecology (barnacle geese) | about 260 days |
| continuous recording at 20 Hz | calculated | about 14 hours |
GPS: 100,000 fixes last about a year at one fix every 5 minutes, about three years at one every 15 minutes. Several animals share the limit.
Large datasets
The full license has no data limit. For scale: the trial alone (25,000,000 GPS fixes) is larger than 424 of the 428 data packages in the Movebank Data Repository (November 2026; median 26,628 locations per package). For very large location datasets Firetail offers Cloud Scenes.
How to cite Firetail
M. Berger, T. Petri, M. Gentile, and F. Schäuffelhut, "Firetail – a fast and versatile software for the visualization and analysis of animal sensor data", Schäuffelhut Berger GmbH, Version 15, 2026. [Software]. Available online from https://www.firetail.de
Papers that used Firetail: selected publications.
Get Firetail
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