New R package ‘remora’ released by the IMOS Animal Tracking Facility

The IMOS Animal Tracking Facility, based here at SIMS, has recently released their new data product remora (Rapid Extraction of Marina Observations for Roving Animals). The package is designed to work with acoustic telemetry data, coming from a large network of strategically located acoustic receivers in waters around Australia to detect and track tagged animals. It can also work with other data types that contain basic timestamps and GPS coordinates such as satellite tracking, species records or fisheries catch data.

 

The team behind the remora package created the product with the aim to enhance the scope of the IMOS toolkit and believe it will be of interest to not only animal trackers but the broader IMOS community as well.

 

The remora R package has the following functionalities:

  • Interactive acoustic telemetry data visualisations (designed to work with datasets accessed via the IMOS database web-interface)
  • Optimised acoustic telemetry QC tools from Hoenner et al. 2018 now accessible to the user community
  • Exploration of available IMOS oceanographic observations concurrent and collocated with spatio-temporal animal occurrence data
  • Extraction and integration of the above animal occurrence data with IMOS oceanographic observations derived from in situ moorings as well as gridded/remotely sensed products

 

This product was a collaborative effort and made possible by the funding from Australia’s Integrated Marine Observing System (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 SIMS.

 

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).