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An application that aims to assist researchers in designing animal tracking projects, by considering specific research questions.

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ecoisilva/movedesign

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movedesign

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Project Status: Active – The project has reached a stable, usable state and is being actively developed.


Overview

The movedesign R package and Shiny application are designed to support researchers in the planning and evaluation of movement ecology studies, focusing on two key targets: estimating home range areas, and estimating movement speed and distance traveled.

Movement ecology studies frequently make use of data collected from animal tracking projects. Planning a successful animal tracking project requires careful consideration and clear objectives. It is crucial to plan ahead and understand how much data is required to accurately answer your chosen research questions, and choose the optimal tracking regime or schedule.

To assist with study design, movedesign integrates the continuous-time methods available with the ctmm R package. Animal movement is inherently autocorrelated (locations are similar as a function of space and time) and the ctmm package allows us to model these data as continuous-time stochastic processes, while dealing with other known biases (such as small sample sizes, irregular or missing data, and location error).

This app was built using the golem framework.

Installation:

To install the stable version of movedesign, run the following:

install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("ecoisilva/movedesign")

If you encounter any issues, consult the installation troubleshooting vignette for potential solutions.

Running the movedesign application:

To launch movedesign, load the library and run the following command in your R console:

library(movedesign)
movedesign::run_app()

Using the movedesign application:

Start with the guided tutorial in the 'Home' tab. For a more detailed introduction, refer to the vignette or the manuscript.

This figure presents a conceptual workflow of the key elements of the ‘movedesign’ application, which provides an R Shiny-powered user interface to test different sampling designs for specified tracking projects.

Getting help:

If you encounter a bug, please submit an issue. For more general questions and suggestions, contact Inês Silva.

Citation

To cite movedesign, use the following:

citation("movedesign")

Silva, I., Fleming, C. H., Noonan, M. J., Fagan, W. F., & Calabrese, J. M. (2023). movedesign: Shiny R app to evaluate sampling design for animal movement studies. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 14(9), 2216–2225. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.14153