Animal movement for conservation: New Tools for Data Management, Visualization and Analysis

Goals

The goal of the course is to develop basic skills to process and visualize movement data and environmental variables as a first step to answer questions related to habitat use and animal responses to environmental changes and conservation strategies. Recent tools in R make high-level visualizations, including maps, animations, interactive graphics, and incorporation of environmental layers, easy to create and manipulate. Movebank provides a standardized web-supported database for managing, sharing and annotating movement data with environmental covariates, a vital step in encouraging and supporting conservation decisions.

What to bring

Bring a laptop! Unfortunately, we won’t be able to provide access to computers or laptops in Cartagena.

We will be using R - interfaced through Rstudio. We assume most participants have experience using R!

We will install a bunch of useful packages on the fly as needed.

Bring enthusiasm!

Structure

The course will mix short “lectures” on theory and tools with practical labs using R. We plan on showing you tools to prepare, manage and share your data and examples of data visualizations that will help you to explore your data and guide your follow-up analysis. We will cover basic analysis for common questions applied to conservation.

Tentative schedule

• 8:30 - introductions

• 9:00-10:30: Movebank
  • intro
  • uploading data / downloading data (web-interface and R)
    
  • PRACTICE
• 10:30-11:30: Processing data
  • working with SpatialPoints objects
  • manipulating data frames
  • dates and times
  • summaries
  • PRACTICE

break

• 12:00 - 13:00: Visualization
  • mapping / scanning / animating
  • PRACTICE

LUNCH

• 14:00 - 15:30: Annotation
  • Movebank variables
  • elevatr
  • MODIStools
  • PRACTICE

break

• 15:30 - 17:00: Spatial Modeling
  • loading rasters & shapefiles
  • projections
  • resource selection functions
  • PRACTICE