This website contains materials from a workshop on Movebank, Env-DATA, Resource and Step-Selection Models held at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA on May 21-23, 2018. The workshop was given again at the Scottish Centre for Ecology and the Natural Environment (SCENE) on April 30-May 2. The purpose of the workshop is to provide hands on training and methods for analyzing data describing the movements of individual animals for movement ecology research and wildlife management. The workshop focuses on tools available through Movebank (movebank.org), a free, online resource for managing, sharing, analyzing and archiving animal tracking data. The EnvDATA System (movebank.org/node/6607) is a tool on Movebank to allow anyone to link animal movements to environmental covariates provided by global remote sensing and weather model data products. The workshop was funded in part by US National Science Foundation Biological Infrastructure award 1564380.
Repository prepared by:
Additional Instructors:
Teaching Assistant/Lab tech 2018: Matthew Snider, North Carolina State University
Teaching Assistant/Lab tech 2019: Arielle Parsons, North Carolina State University,https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Arielle_Waldstein_Parsons
The scripts make heavy use of the amt package, which is described here
Citation for amt: Signer, J., Fieberg, J. and Avgar, T., 2019. Animal movement tools (amt): R package for managing tracking data and conducting habitat selection analyses. Ecology and evolution, 9(2), pp.880-890.
This website was originally created to host material from the workshop given in 2018. That year, we captured all of the lectures here. The Preparatation Steps, below, will allow you to follow the difference lectures and practicals from that year.
In 2019, we modified a few things and added some new material. Specifically:
You will see these updates as you scroll through the material on the individual tabs.
Steps to prepare for the workshop (or to run files on your own):
The scripts provided are based on Movebank’s data format and access and read data directly from Movebank. Data owners can upload and manage data on Movebank in private or public studies and retain ownership of and control over access to their data. See https://www.movebank.org/node/856 for instructions to set up your own study or contact support@movebank.org for help.
Download all the R Scripts contained in the zip file here: R Scripts for Workshop.
Unzip these files and make note of where you have saved them on your computer.
Open Rstudio and create a project associated with the directory where you stored all the R scripts. Choose File -> New Project, then select “Existing directory”, and find the directory on your computer where you stored all of the R scripts.
Install the following packages (with dependencies): amt, ggmap, knitr, htmltools, leaflet, lubridate, maptools, move, raster, rglwidget, sp, tictoc, tidyverse (ggplot2, dplyr, tidyr, readr, purrr, tibble, stringr, and forcats). Note: you can install packages along with dependencies by typing: install.packages(“packagename”, dependencies=TRUE)
Create a subdirectory called “data” within your project folder (the folder where you stored the scripts). Download the annotated data sets, below, and place them in your data subdirectory.
These data sets contain environmental covariates that will be merged onto the location data sets (using the mergdat.R script).
Please cite the use of material presented here as:
Fieberg J, Bohrer G, Davidson SC, Kays R (2018) Short course on analyzing animal tracking data. Presented at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Raleigh, NC, USA. May 21–23, 2018. https://movebankworkshopraleighnc.netlify.com/index.html