We recently published a review paper on the R packages created to process or analyze tracking data: a total of 58 packages. In a guest blog post in the Animal Ecology in Focus blog, we described the review as “an introduction to this set of packages for researchers, and to provide feedback and recommendations to package developers, from a user perspective. We described each package based on a workflow centered around tracking data, broken down in three stages: pre-processing, post-processing, and analysis”.
R packages are dynamic, new packages are created, old packages get updated and some even disappear or get deprecated due to lack of maintenance. For that reason, we created a CRAN Task View (CTV) on tracking packages, that will be updated every 6 months. The CTV is based on the “tracking workflow”, so we encourage you to read the manuscript for an extended description of the workflow and the methods used by the packages. There is an additional section in the CTV about packages dealing with movement but not tracking data; for the moment, the section is split into “biologging but not tracking data” and “non-biologging video and images”, but we could add more categories (and packages) if necessary later. We welcome suggestions!
For those who read the review, not all of the packages in the review are present in the CTV. While the review took into account all packages from all repositories, since this is a CRAN Task View, we only kept packages that passed the CRAN check test. Most GitHub packages did not pass it. Details about the test can be found here. We will update the CTV at the beginning and middle of each calendar year, so developers and users can reach us—preferably by opening issues on the GitHub repository of the CTV—to suggest new packages to include, or existing packages hosted on GitHub if they now pass the CRAN check test. Contact us also if we have missed any of your package’s functionalities that we should add.
We really welcome your contributions, they can only make this CTV more useful for everyone!
For the maintainers, Rocío.