Title: Navigating through the R packages for movement,
Abstract: The advent of miniaturized biologging devices has provided ecologists with
unparalleled opportunities to record animal movement across scales, and led to
the collection of ever-increasing quantities of tracking data. In parallel,
sophisticated tools to process, visualize and analyze tracking data have been
developed in abundance. Within the R software alone, we listed 57 focused on
these tasks, called here tracking packages. Here, we reviewed these tracking
packages, as an introduction to this set of packages for researchers, and to
provide feedback and recommendations to package developers, from a user
perspective. We described each package based on a workflow centered around
tracking data (i.e. (x,y,t)), broken down in three stages: pre-processing,
post-processing, and analysis (data visualization, track description, path
reconstruction, behavioral pattern identification, space use characterization,
trajectory simulation and others).
Supporting documentation is key to the accessibility of a package for users.
Based on a user survey, we reviewed the quality of packages' documentation, and
identified $12$ packages with good or excellent documentation. Links between
packages were assessed through a network graph analysis. Although a large group
of packages shows some degree of connectivity (either depending on functions or
suggesting the use of another tracking package), a third of tracking packages
work on isolation, reflecting a fragmentation in the R Movement-Ecology
programming community.
Finally, we provide recommendations for users to choose packages, and for
developers to maximize usefulness of their contribution and strengthen the
links between the programming community.