Introduction and System Setup

Overview

This two-day workshop will introduce you to the basics of working with telemetry data in R.

We will providing a data set to use throughout the workshop, but we encourage you to bring along your own data for the hackathon session (Friday AM).

The workshop will include:

  • The basics of spatial data in R
  • How to read in, clean, and QA your telemetry data
  • How to create useful summaries of your data
  • Data visualization techniques for spatial and telemetry data (graphs and maps)
  • How to use the bcmaps and bcdata packages to get vector and raster data from official BC government sources.
  • How to perform spatial operations to compile and generate landcape covariates
  • How to extract spatial information for telemetry and random location points

The workshop will not include:

  • Methodological details on technical telemetry parameters i.e. DOP estimates
  • Advanced modeling techniques

Agenda

Day 1

  • Setup and troubleshooting (8:30 - 9:00)
  • Working with spatial data in R (9:00 - 10:30)
  • BREAK (10:30 - 11:00)
  • Telemetry data in R; clean, QA, and prepare data (Part I; 11:00 - 12:30)
  • LUNCH (12:30 - 1:30)
  • Telemetry data in R; clean, QA, and prepare data (Part II; 1:30 - 3:00)
  • BREAK (3:00 - 3:30)
  • Visualizing spatial data in R (3:30 - 4:30)

Day 2

  • Setup and troubleshooting (8:30 - 9:00)
  • Retrieving spatial data from the B.C. Data Catalogue (9:00 - 10:30)
  • BREAK (10:30 - 11:00)
  • Getting and working with raster data (Part I; 11:00 - 12:30)
  • LUNCH (12:30 - 1:30)
  • Preparing base data for telemetry analysis (Part II; 1:30 - 3:00)
  • BREAK (3:00 - 3:30)
  • Preparing data for Resource Selection Function (RSF) analysis (3:30 - 4:30)

Computing requirements

You will require the following software installed and configured for the workshop. Please have this set up and ready to go before we start.

You will need:

Install R and RStudio

You will need:

  • R version >= 4.2.0
  • RStudio >= 2023.03.1

Install R

Download and install R for your operating system from https://cloud.r-project.org/.

Windows with no admin rights:

If you do not have administrator rights, the installer will default to installing somewhere in your user folder (e.g., C:/Users/username/AppData/Local/Programs/). If you prefer, you can change the location to another folder that you have write access to, just make sure it is on your C:/ drive.

Install R Studio

Download and install RStudio Desktop from https://posit.co/download/rstudio-desktop/. This page should automatically offer you the version suitable for your operating system, but you can scroll down to find versions for all operating systems.

Windows with admin rights:

Download the .zip archive for Windows under “Zip/Tarballs”. Create a folder called RStudio in a location on your C:/ drive, where you have write access (e.g. C:/Users/username/AppData/Local/Programs/RStudio), and extract the zip file into this folder. Find the RStudio program in this folder: it is named rstudio.exe, but the file extension will typically be hidden, so look for rstudio. Right-click this file to create a shortcut and drag it to your desktop/task bar. Use the shortcut to open RStudio.

Install packages

In R, install the necessary packages by running:

install.packages(
  c("tidyverse", "sf", "terra", "mapview", "bcdata", "bcmaps", "readxl", 
    "ggplot2", "usethis", "lubridate", "ggdensity","ggspatial", "prettymapr")
)

QGIS (optional)

QGIS is a free and open-source geographic information system (GIS) that allows you to create, edit, visualize, analyze and publish geospatial information.

Download and install from the QGIS website.

Workshop materials and data

We have created an empty RStudio project containing the workshop data.

The easiest way to get started to run:

usethis::use_course(
  "https://github.com/ninoxconsulting/r-telemetry-workshop-nov-2023/raw/main/r-telemetry-workshop.zip"
  )

This will download the workshop materials, save them in a logical spot on your computer, and open the project in a new RStudio session.

Alternatively, you can download the zip file from here, decompress the zip file somewhere convenient on your C:/ drive. Then, navigate to the newly created folder (called r-telemetry-workshop), and double click on the r-telemetry-workshop.Rproj file to open the project in RStudio.