The goal of movedesign is to assist researchers in designing movement ecology studies related to two main research questions: the estimation of home range and of speed and distance traveled.

Movement ecology studies frequently make use of data collected from animal tracking projects. Planning a successful animal tracking project requires careful consideration and clear objectives. It is crucial to plan ahead and understand how much data is required to accurately answer your chosen research questions, and choose the optimal tracking regime or schedule.

To facilitate study design, we refer to the ctmm R package. Animal movement is inherently autocorrelated (locations are similar as a function of space and time) and the ctmm package allows us to model these data as continuous-time stochastic processes, while dealing with other known biases (such as small sample sizes, or irregular sampling schedules).

The app was built using the golem framework.

You can install the stable version of movedesign like so:

install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("ecoisilva/movedesign")

If you run with any problems, try the solutions listed in the instalation issues vignette.

To launch movedesign, type the following code into the R console after you have loaded the library:

library(movedesign)
movedesign::run_app()

Run the guided tutorial in the “Home” tab (see the vignette for how to begin), and check out the manuscript for further details.

If you encounter a bug, please submit an issue. For more general questions and suggestions, contact Inês Silva.

citation("movedesign")

Silva, I., Fleming, C. H., Noonan, M. J., Fagan, W. F., & Calabrese, J. M. (2023). movedesign: Shiny R app to evaluate sampling design for animal movement studies. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 14(9), 2216-2225.