The animalmove package provides a series of statistical analyses of spatio-temporal animal movement patterns at the population level, as originally described in the paper "How landscape dynamics link individual- to population-level movement patterns: a multispecies comparison of ungulate relocation data", Mueller, Thomas, et al. Global Ecology and Biogeography 20, no. 5 (2011): 683–94. DOI: 10.1111/j.1466-8238.2010.00638.x.
We start with the import of the library animalmove in R environment. The package can be installed in the local system from the source package archive for OS X or Win platform. See the package README for installation information.
There are three statistical analyses in the package, each with its own vignette demonstrating analysis usage:
Realized Mobility Index (RMI) - reports the amount of habitat an individual occupies as a proportion of the population range calculated across individuals
Movement Coordination Index (MCI) - measures the degree to which movements among individuals are related in direction and distance
Population Dispersion Index (PDI) - measures the inter-relation of relocation records across individuals within a species as a point pattern to detect whether individuals co- occur, are dispersed from each other or are independently distributed
Each of the analyses incorporates the methodology described in the paper, and produces a numerical outcome, which can be assesed by examining the result set or be summarized and visualized using the custom summaries and high-level functions.
The analyses assume the relocation data of multiple species are preliminarily synchronized and preprocessed by time and space dimensions.