The IMOS Animal Tracking Facility worked with a team of expert data scientists, animal tracking researchers and modellers to develop remora.
The IMOS Animal Tracking Facility were able to develop the new data product after receiving a Research Attraction and Acceleration Program grant from the Office of the New South Wales Chief Scientist & Engineer.
Remora has been created as a R package to facilitate the Rapid Extraction of Marine Observations for Roving Animals. R is a programming language for statistical computing and graphics that can be used to clean, analyze, and graph data.
The remora R package includes the following functions:
- Interactive exploration of animal movements in space and time from acoustic telemetry data (designed to work with datasets accessed via the IMOS database web-interface);
- Allows users to conduct robust quality-control of acoustic telemetry data as described in Hoenner et al. 2018;
- Identifies available IMOS satellite-derived and sub-surface in situ oceanographic datasets coincident and collocated with the animal movement data;
- Extraction and integration of the animal occurrence data with IMOS oceanographic observations derived from in situ moorings as well as gridded/remotely sensed products.
Dr Fabrice Jaine, from the IMOS Animal Tracking Facility and the Sydney Institute of Marine Science, led the team who created remora.
“While the package was designed to work with acoustic telemetry data, the environmental integration functionalities (for gridded as well as in situ mooring data) also work with other data types that contain basic timestamps and GPS coordinates such as satellite tracking, Reef Life Survey-type species sightings or fisheries catch data,” said Dr Jaine.
“We believe this greatly enhances the scope of the toolkit and will be of interest and relevance to the broader IMOS community, not just animal trackers.”
Browse source code at: https://github.com/IMOS-AnimalTracking/remora/
This work was funded by Australia’s Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS, www.imos.org.au) and a Research Attraction and Acceleration Program grant from the Office of the New South Wales Chief Scientist & Engineer awarded to Sydney Institute of Marine Science.
Remora was developed by Fabrice Jaine (IMOS Animal Tracking Facility, Sydney Institute of Marine Science), Ian Jonsen (IMOS Animal Tracking Facility, Macquarie University), Vinay Udyawer (Australian Institute of Marine Science), Ross Dwyer (University of the Sunshine Coast), Kylie Scales (University of the Sunshine Coast), Francisca Maron (IMOS Animal Tracking Facility, Sydney Institute of Marine Science), Xavier Hoenner (CSIRO), Charlie Huveneers (Flinders University).