As many have observed over the last few months, new data uploads to Motus have experienced processing delays, which has led to a data backlog and is impacting timely data access.
Diagnosing and stabilizing this issue requires more extensive maintenance than initially anticipated. However, we are currently in the process of replacing hardware and rebuilding software that are contributing to these data processing delays and intermittent interruptions. While we complete this rebuild, we have temporarily paused new data uploads. This pause allows us to conduct the work more quickly, avoid compounding existing backlogs, and ensure the system restarts in a stable state. We will provide an update on the progress of data processing to the Motus community on February 6, 2026, and will provide more frequent updates in the future.
In addition, we are currently completing significant back-end work to drastically improve data accessibility and support the continued growth and expectations of the system. We will provide an update on these changes in the coming months.
All Motus data remains safe and intact, and no data has been lost. Processed data will remain accessible via the Motus R package during this maintenance.
We greatly appreciate your patience while we work through these critical improvements and apologize for the inconvenience. These are necessary and important steps toward improving long-term reliability and scalability of the system.
I have had a tower online since November 23 where an active 166/Lotek-tagged bluebird has been proximate to the tower the entire time and zero detections have been recorded.
I am certain the tag is transmitting because it has been verified by use of a portable Lotek receiver.
Does this outage go as far back as November?
Our Motus tower launch has been a colossal disappointment after 27 months of slogging through an arduous permits and gatekeepers locally. Any news article to celebrate has been quashed due to this dysfunction.
Thank you for the update! The sooner we know information like this the more time we can avoid spending in somewhat fruitless testing of tags and stations to try and self-diagnose problems. It is also very timely as many researchers must make decisions in the next few weeks on whether to order and deploy more tags for the 2026 field season. I appreciate an update on progress of the backlog is coming on Feb 6, but can you tell us now:
1 - how far back does the data backlog go?
2 - does it affect 166 and 434 data differently, and/or is it random by station or region?
3 - Is all raw data up-to-date and available via R? Please explain or give a link to definition of what you mean by “Processed data” and that it will remain accessible.
Thank you very much for your hard work in an unstable time.
Hi Gregg, you shouldn’t be seeing a backlog going back to November. For the most part it’s been around 2-3 weeks.
But there are lots of other potential factors that might be affecting why you aren’t seeing the tag that’s present. At least, there are other possible issues to rule out first… Deployment metadata for the station and tag are the first things to check. If you can share the project, station, and tag info that would help us look into it. Maybe send that in another thread or by email.
1 - the backlog should only go back to around the beginning of Jan.
2 - It’s more 166 related. 434 data follows a couple different pathways. Generally speaking, the handling by the Motus server is pretty minimal and is more related to file transfers rather than searching for tag IDs. There is more info about the various data pathways here: How Data are Processed | Motus Docs. My colleagues @user151 or @DenisLepage may be able to add a bit more context here, but the gist is that you shouldn’t be surprised to see different “recency” dates for 434 and 166 MHz data.
3 - the backlog will definitely affect what you download via the R package. For the most part, what you download will reflect what you see on Motus.org, though of course the R package always includes the detailed and nonfiltered data.
Thank you for this update. As I manually upload additional detection files, I can tell that processing is moving faster and smoother as a result of work done.
Having said that, as I sort through the 35+ stations I manage, I’m noticing some station data that either was not processed at all or not processed completely (prior to the upgrades). Some of this is SG data downloaded and packaged from the wifi connection, some of this was SG data directly transferred and then compressed from the SD card, and some of it is Sigma Eight data. What is the process for sorting through and remedying these situations–in some cases I cannot just re-upload the data, because it theoretically has already been processed?
Thanks so much for your patience with these processing issues. I’m looking into whether we can reprocess the data from your stations and I’ll get back to you by the end of the week with more information.