movebank

[TAlexPerkins]

data repository for animal tracking data

https://www.movebank.org

[sckott]

Good idea @TAlexPerkins - sorry about no reply

do you use it much. in the time since your post did anything happen?

[Stan125]

Hi there, I'm interested in working on this. Can you tell a total newbie more about what the package would provide? Would the utility be to access the public database, or to connect to the data uploaded with your own account?

[sckott]

actually, it looks like there may already be an R client for movebank https://www.movebank.org/node/5919 and https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/move/index.html - It looks like it's relatively recently updated as well

I'm not familiar with Movebank, so perhaps there are things not covered by that pkg

[cboettig]

Hey @TAlexPerkins ,

I was just looking at movebank to get some spatial data for my class (don't really know what I want to do with it, so definitely looking for suggestions).

Anyway, I found the move package a bit frustrating, adds a lot of dependencies and doesn't really expose all of the underlying data (well, does better if you just use the getMovebank method with the entity type name and ignore all the other methods). Though the more underlying problem for me is inconsistencies in the data itself (e.g. in whether or not I can actually download data that is flagged as i_can_see_data).

I've put some notes here for comparison: https://github.com/cboettig/movebank . See README.Rmd, the R package bit itself just does a lightweight and a bit more error-safe version of getMovebank to call the API directly, so it's a bit easier to see how the R function relates to the commands given in the API docs: https://github.com/movebank/movebank-api-doc/blob/master/movebank-api.md

Just me fiddling for the moment, but might try and follow up with the admins about what's going on with this data.

[maelle]

Thank you!

Note that future ideas should go to our wishlist forum category.