Jack Brandy, our Director of Geospatial Solutions, is giving a lightning talk at SatSummit 2026 in St. Louis. The question: how can agentic data management help bio-logging data become the shared, lasting archive of animal life that the field is asking for, and what have we learned trying?
Thousands of wild animals carry tags that record where they go, how they move, and what surrounds them. A 2025 Perspective in Nature Ecology & Evolution (Davidson, Cagnacci, Rutz and colleagues) lays out the problem. Of nearly 10,000 discoverable bio-logging studies, about one in eight allow public download, and many more sit in local storage. Every tag maker, network, and platform uses its own formats, units, and names, so combining even a few dozen datasets can take months or years. The community's answer is a shared vocabulary, transfer protocols, and aggregation protocols, backed by platforms that preserve and steward data beyond the life of a project.
Standards only pay off once data conforms to them, and that is the slow, unfunded part: working out what each field means, mapping it to the vocabulary, checking fix quality and tag health, recording where every value came from, and doing it all again when a source changes. Jack will walk through what happens when software agents take on that work: which parts they handle well, where they need a person in the loop, and the lessons learned so far.
If you are at SatSummit, come find us.