A Practical Course on Analysing Tracking Data
Modern marine-mammal research depends heavily on movement data: satellite telemetry, GPS tags, TDRs, acoustic detections, opportunistic tracks, and photo-ID–derived movement paths. Understanding how individuals move, use space, interact with their environment, and respond to human pressures is central to conservation and ecological inference.
https://prstats.org/course/movement-ecology-the-analysis-of-movement-data-move09/
Movement Ecology (MOVE09) is a five-day, live online course that gives movement ecology researchers the tools to transform raw tracking data into rigorous ecological insight.
The core principles of movement ecology and how they apply to large, mobile species where movement is influenced by physical and physiological constraints, prey distribution and behavioural states.
How to analyse movement trajectories:
step lengths, turning angles, path tortuosity
behavioural segmentation (e.g., foraging, travelling, resting)
identifying migration, site fidelity and exploratory behaviour
Methods for estimating home ranges and utilisation distributions in including how to interpret isopleths when movement is constrained by coastlines, fronts or oceanographic features.
Techniques for assessing interactions:
dynamic movement metrics
residence time and first-passage time
identifying hotspots, foraging areas and important habitats
How to conduct resource- and step-selection analyses using environmental covariates such as depth, chlorophyll, SST, fronts, prey proxies, or human activity layers (shipping, fishing).
How to choose and evaluate different tracking technologies and understand how sampling frequency, location error and behaviour affect analysis.
Marine-mammal movement data come with unique complexities: long dive cycles, remote open-ocean habitats, environmental drivers that vary across depth and space, and irregular or error-prone location data. Simple descriptive methods rarely capture the processes driving movement.
This course helps you:
Identify behavioural states, core areas, movement patterns and habitat preferences with statistical confidence.
Link movement pathways with oceanographic conditions, prey availability and anthropogenic pressures.
Quantify differences in space use across seasons, age classes, or individuals.
Produce defensible analyses for conservation, impact assessment, marine-protected-area design, and ecological publications.
Five full days, live online.
A clear mix of lectures, theory and R-based practicals using movement datasets.
Designed for marine-mammal ecologists, conservation scientists, telemetry analysts and graduate researchers who work with location-based or movement data.