Explore your Movebank data on the desktop

From Movebank to your desktop

Firetail connects to Movebank directly. With your Movebank account you choose what to download:

1. By tag, individual or deployment: File > Download Movebank Data, then pick the study (a quick filter helps with long lists) and one or several items.
2. What to fetch: the complete data, only the updates since your last download, or a date range. Updates and date ranges are part of the full license.
3. Large studies: if Movebank ends a long download early, Firetail can download in chunks.

Firetail keeps the data as a local snapshot on your machine, ready to reopen any time via File > Open Previous Downloads, and loaded this way the annotation features are available. Make sure that folder is part of your backups.

Or from files

Data exported from Movebank or from the Movebank Data Repository opens via File > Open CSV File(s). Firetail reads most columns that follow the Movebank standards, in particular location data, acceleration data and event-based accessory data, as well as reference data.

Everything in one view

The map, the acceleration bursts and the other sensors play on one timeline. In the Open Files panel you choose which individuals or tags are shown, zoom the map to one of them, and hide sensors you don't need. Reference data from Movebank can colour the trajectories by their metadata.

Built around Movebank

Firetail grew out of the Movebank Acceleration Viewer, which Matthias Berger started in 2011 while working on the Movebank platform, and Movebank names Firetail as its successor. See our story.