GLATOS Coding Workshops 2026 - Intro to R and Advanced R

NOTE: this workshop has been update to align with OTN’s 2025 Detection Extract Format. For older detection extracts, please see the this lesson: Archived OTN Workshop.

This pair of workshops will introduce the R programming language, popular in the field of biologging.

In session one we will explore some of the popular software packages suitable for exploring and plotting acoustic telemetry data, including dplyr and ggplot2, for the purpose of generating summaries for reports.

The second session offers a brief overview of the glatos R package for performing detection filtering, various calculations and plotting. We will then explore an OTN telemetry dataset and a raster bathymetry dataset using the popular R geospatial pacakges sf and terra.

If you have questions about this curriculum, please reach out to otndc@dal.ca

Schedule

	Setup	Download files required for the lesson
00:00	1. Background	What is the Ocean Tracking Network? How does your local telemetry network interact with OTN? What methods of data analysis will be covered?
00:05	2. Intro to R	What are common operators in R? What are common data types in R? What are some base R functions? How do I deal with missing data?
00:55	3. Starting with Data Frames	How do I import tabular data? How do I explore my data set? What are some basic data manipulation functions?
01:30	4. Intro to Plotting	How do I plot my data? How can I plot summaries of my data?
01:55	5. Telemetry Reports - Imports	What datasets do I need from the Network? How do I import all the datasets?
02:05	6. Telemetry Reports for Array Operators	How do I summarize and plot my deployments? How do I summarize and plot my detections?
02:35	7. Telemetry Reports for Tag Owners	How do I summarize and plot my detections? How do I summarize and plot my tag metadata?
03:05	8. Introduction to glatos Data Processing Package	How do I load my data into glatos? How do I filter out false detections? How can I consolidate my detections into detection events? How do I summarize my data?
03:35	9. More Features of glatos	What other features does glatos offer?
03:50	10. Basic Visualization and Plotting with glatos	How can I use glatos to plot my data? What kinds of plots can I make with my data?
04:20	11. Intro to Geospatial Data in R	What is spatial data in R? What is a coordinate reference system (CRS)? How do I check and change a CRS? How does CRS choice affect distance and area?
05:35	12. Animation with pathroutr	How can I create animal movement plots that avoid land?
05:55	Finish

The actual schedule may vary slightly depending on the topics and exercises chosen by the instructor.