Movement is the fundamental ecological attribute of free-ranging animals. Recent technical developments in satellite tags enable data collected at a very fine-scale and detailed behavioural insights of animal movement. This opens up multiple questions to understand the role of movement for a better understanding of species ecology. Based on these recent developments, movement ecology has become a fundamental branch in ecology, conservation, and management. ‘R’ is an open-source statistical platform widely used in ecological research that enables users to analyze, model, and visualize complex movement patterns. The ‘Movement Ecology Analysis in R’ workshop aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the principles of movement ecology and how to use R to analyze and visualize movement data by applying advanced tools and methods.

The workshop will focus on data procurement, pre-processing, analysis, validation, and visualization using R.

Data processing – how to prepare data from radio-tags for analysis, address the issues of outliers and missing location

Trajectory-based analysis – primarily focusing on summary statistics of trajectory, exploratory analysis, step lengths, turning angle, displacement, dispersal, speed, and temporal activity. Visualization – Prepare visualizations of the animal trajectory and other track statistics.

Home range analysis - Minimum Convex Polygon (MCP), Kernel Density Estimator (KDE), Autocorrelated Kernel Density Estimator (aKDE), and Brownian Bridge Movement Model (BBMM).

Individual interaction - Spatial and dynamic interactions deal with the home range based interaction between individuals.

Advanced Modelling - Advanced behavioural modeling would cover the different behavioural phases of the animal utilization distribution estimation based on Hidden Markov chains.

Habitat selection – The analysis would be carried out at two levels, home-range level (Resource selection function) and individual steps level (Step-selection function).

The workshop will include both lectures and hands-on applications in R. Depending on the interest and skill set of participants; we can cover additional topics. Participants are encouraged to bring their own telemetry dataset. This workshop is ideal for ecologists, wildlife managers, and researchers, who want to gain a better understanding of animal movement and how to analyze movement data in R. By the end of the workshop, participants will have the skills and knowledge to conduct independent movement ecology research and contribute to the growing field of movement ecology.