Acoustic telemetry is a popular technique used to study the movements of aquatic animals, and a variety of analytical approaches and R packages currently exist to help researchers extract the most meaningful biological information. However, few approaches are yet capable of accounting for the land barriers in these aquatic environments, which are important constraints to the movements performed. Here we will introduce the new R package RSP (Refined Shortest Paths; https://github.com/YuriNiella/RSP), which recreates the movements of tracked animals exclusively inside the water. Using practical examples, we will show you how to prepare your acoustic data for processing with the R packages actel (https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=actel) and RSP, to analyse and visualize habitat utilization patterns and overlaps between different biological groups, both in space and time.
Yuri Niella is a PhD student in the Marine Predator Research Group (Macquarie University), interested in how anthropogenic stressors (habitat loss, fishing, climate change) are impacting the spatial and trophic ecology of large bodied coastal sharks.
Hugo Flávio is a Post-doctoral fellow at Wilfrid Laurier University, particularly interested in systematic and reproducible data analysis, as well as the conservation and restoration of aquatic environments.
A recording of this workshop can be found here.
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