Firetail FAQ
Short answers about Firetail, the software for animal tracking data. All key facts on one page: Firetail at a glance.
What is Firetail?
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. It is made by Schäuffelhut Berger GmbH in Unterhaching, Germany, and the current version is 15.0.1 (17 September 2026).
Is Firetail free?
The Free Edition is free and needs no license: it opens up to 100,000 GPS fixes and 1,000,000 sensor samples, with up to 5 groupings and a 2 months time range. A free 3-month trial raises the limits to 25,000,000 fixes and 100,000,000 samples. Larger projects need a paid license.
How much does a Firetail license cost?
A full license costs 699 EUR for the first year, 629 EUR for the second and 559 EUR per year from the third, plus VAT where applicable. It removes the data limits and includes updates and support. Volume discounts apply from 3 licenses.
Do I need to know programming to use Firetail?
No. Firetail is a desktop application with a graphical interface: you load data from Movebank or from files, annotate behaviour by hand, and classify acceleration data with FireSOM from a dialog, without programming or scripts. Results can be exported as CSV for further analysis, for example in R.
What does "sample" mean in the edition limits?
One sample is one point in time of an acceleration burst, i.e. one x/y/z triplet. A burst of 3.8 seconds at 10.54 Hz, a common e-obs setting, has 40 samples.
How much data fits in the Free Edition?
With the burst settings of published studies, for example 3.8 seconds at 10.54 Hz every 5 minutes or 2 seconds at 20 Hz every 15 minutes, 1 million samples cover about 4 to 9 months of one animal. Continuous recording at 20 to 50 Hz fills it within hours. 100,000 GPS fixes last about a year at one fix every 5 minutes.
How large can datasets be?
The full license has no data limit; the computer's memory sets the practical limit. For comparison: the trial alone (25,000,000 fixes) is larger than 424 of the 428 data packages in the Movebank Data Repository (November 2026; median 26,628 locations). For very large location datasets Firetail offers Cloud Scenes.
Which operating systems does Firetail run on?
Windows, macOS and Linux. One download covers all editions; the license decides the limits.
Can Firetail synchronize video with accelerometer data?
Yes. The VideoSync module replays video in step with GPS and sensor data; you align it on a shared event and use what you see as ground truth for behaviour annotation, including annotations imported from BORIS. VideoSync is part of the trial and the full license.
Is Firetail open source?
No, Firetail is closed-source commercial software. To keep results reproducible, the manual documents the methods (for example the ODBA formula and the features FireSOM uses), annotations can be exported as CSV, and each release can be cited with its version number.
Is the Movebank Acceleration Viewer still available?
No. The Movebank Acceleration Viewer (2011 to 2020) is no longer developed, and current Java versions can no longer start it. Firetail is its successor, made by the same team, and opens the viewer's annotation files.
How do I 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
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