Background OTN + Workshop Outline

Overview

Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• What is the Ocean Tracking Network?

• How does your local telemetry network interact with OTN?

• What methods of data analysis will be covered?

Objectives

Intro to OTN

The Ocean Tracking Network (OTN) supports global telemetry research by providing training, equipment, and data infrastructure to our large network of partners.

OTN and affiliated networks provide automated cross-referencing of your detection data with other tags in the system to help resolve “mystery detections” and provide detection data to taggers in other regions. OTN’s Data Managers will also extensively quality-control your submitted metadata for errors to ensure the most accurate records possible are stored in the database. OTN’s database and Data Portal website are excellent places to archive your datasets for future use and sharing with collaborators. We offer pathways to publish your datasets with OBIS, and via open data portals like ERDDAP, GeoServer etc. The data-product format returned by OTN is directly ingestible by analysis packages such as glatos and resonATe for ease of analysis. OTN offers support for the use of these packages and tools.

Learn more about OTN and our partners here https://members.oceantrack.org/. Please contact OTNDC@DAL.CA if you are interested in connecting with your regional network and learning about their affiliation with OTN.

Intended Audience

This set of workshop material is directed at researchers who need to create reports based on their acoustic telemetry records. The first few lessons are meant to be self-study, and ensure that the necessary introductory R coding skills are known prior to the workshop.

Getting Started

Please follow the instructions in the “Setup” tab along the top menu to install all required software, packages and data files. If you have questions or are running into errors please reach out to OTNDC@DAL.CA for support.

Pre-workshop content

If you do not have any experience with R coding, or want to refresh your skills, we highly recommend working through the first two lessons, starting here.

If you’d like to refresh your R coding skills outside of this workshop curriculum, we recommend Data Analysis and Visualization in R for Ecologists as a good starting point. Much of this content is included in the first few background lessons of this workshop.

There are many useful packages not covered in this workshop, some of these have been taught in other workshops and the lessons are available upon request.

Key Points