move2: R package for processing movement data

Abstract

• Studying animal movement is key to understanding ecological processes and studying the impacts of global change. The pivotal importance of collecting movement data drives technological development, and as a consequence, movement trajectories are gathered at unprecedented rates.

• For the analysis of the ever‐increasing volume of movement tracks, software packages that bridge between data storage, analysis and visualization are crucial. To facilitate analysis, it is key that the metadata, as well as projections, measurements units, and attributes for the track as a whole and auxiliary sensor measurements, are retained. At the same time, the software needs to be flexible enough to accommodate data from the multitude of different sources and tracking technologies.

• Here, we present the newly developed R package move2 that facilitates import, manipulation, analysis and visualization of movement tracks. The package enables the usage of new programming techniques developed in recent years and has been developed based on the experiences made in the past decade with the move package.

• The package is tightly integrated into the Movebank ‘ecosystem’ by being a key data format in MoveApps and providing a direct download option from movebank. However, move2 allows the integration of movement data sources of any provenance, providing a generic entry point for movement data analysis in R.