Analyse Animal Movement Data Effectively & Confidently — From GPS to Ecology
The Movement Ecology course provides a comprehensive, practical introduction to analysing movement and tracking data across species — from ringing/CMR and VHF telemetry to GPS and path-tracking datasets. Whether you're studying birds, mammals, reptiles or any mobile organisms, this course gives you the conceptual foundation, statistical know-how, and coding tools needed to turn raw tracking data into ecological inference. https://prstats.org/course/movement-ecology-the-analysis-of-movement-data-move09/ What You Will Learn - The core concepts of movement ecology: how movement relates to behaviour, ecology, and the environment. - How to analyse movement trajectories — from steps and turns to segmentation and classification of movement modes (e.g. home-range, dispersal, migration, nomadism). - Methods for estimating home ranges and utilisation distributions, creating isopleths, quantifying overlap, and defining core areas. - Tools to assess interactions and dynamic movement metrics, such as first-passage time or residence time, and to study how individuals move within space and time. - Techniques for resource and habitat-selection analyses: integrating spatial data with movement metrics, conducting step-selection or resource-selection models to infer habitat use and movement decisions. - How to choose appropriate tracking technology, considering motion capacity, environmental context, and research questions — enabling you to design robust movement studies rather than just analysing data. Format & Structure - The course runs for *5 days, 8 hours per day* (live online). - It combines lectures, theory, and hands-on practical exercises in R — giving you direct experience working with real movement datasets. - Designed for ecologists, conservation biologists, wildlife researchers, and anyone working with telemetry, tagging, tracking or spatial movement data. Why This Course Matters Tracking and movement data have become central to understanding animal ecology: migration, habitat use, dispersal, social interactions, conservation, and responses to environmental change. The analytical demand is high — and simple descriptive statistics often fall short. This course bridges the gap by offering a unified framework that combines ecology, behaviour, movement theory and modern statistical methods. Movements are rarely random: internal state, motion and navigation capacity, and external environment all shape how and where animals move. Understanding these drivers — not just plotting tracks — is essential for conservation, management, population dynamics or behavioural ecology. -- Oliver Hooker PhD. PR stats [[alternative HTML version deleted]] _______________________________________________ R-sig-ecology mailing list [email protected] https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-ecology
