Background

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 are ready to begin the work of acoustic telemetry data analysis. The first few lessons will begin with introductory R - no previous coding experince required.

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 two lessons of this workshop.

Getting Started

Please follow the instrucions 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.

Intro to Telemetry Data Analysis

OTN-affiliated telemetry networks all provide researchers with pre-formatted datasets, which are easily ingested into these data analysis tools.

Before diving in to a lot of analysis, it is important to take the time to clean and sort your dataset, taking the pre-formatted files and combining them in different ways, allowing you to analyse the data with different questions in mind.

There are multiple R packages necessary for efficient and thorough telemetry data analysis. General packages that allow for data cleaning and arrangement, dataset manipulation and visualization, network analysis and temporo-spatial locating are used in conjuction with the telemetry analysis tool packages VTtrack, actel and glatos.

This workshop will cover only basic tidyverse and ggplot2 functions, but the curriculum can act as a stepping-stone towards more complex analyses.

Key Points