OTN's Telemetry Workshop Curriculum Base

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. The data is then transformed for ingestion into the powerful acoustic telemetry packages remora and actel, along with examples from each package.

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. Introduction to actel	What does the actel package do? When should I consider using Actel to analyze my acoustic telemetry data?
05:05	12. Preparing ACT/OTN/GLATOS Data for actel	How do I take my ACT detection extracts and metadata and format them for use in actel?
05:35	13. Basic Animation	How do I set up my data extract for animation? How do I animate my animal movements?
05:55	14. Animation with pathroutr	How can I create animal movement plots that avoid land?
06:15	15. Quality Control Checks with Remora	How do I use Remora to quality check my data?
06:30	16. Spatial and Temporal Modelling with GAMs	What are GAMs? How can I use GAMs to visualise my data?
06:30	17. Introduction to the miscYAPS package	What is YAPS? For what applications is YAPS well-suited? How can I use the miscYAPS package to make working with YAPS easier?
06:30	18. Introduction to Git for Code	What is Git and why should I use it? How can you use Git for code management? What is the difference between GitHub and GitLab? Why does OTN use both GitHub and GitLab for project management?
07:15	19. Other OTN Telemetry Curriculums	How can I expand my learning?
07:15	20. Public Data Endpoints	What public endpoints does OTN provide, and when should I use each?
07:25	21. Accessing OTN GeoServer Data	What is GeoServer and what does it serve? How do I download OTN layers like stations or receivers? How can I bring these layers into R or Python for mapping?
07:55	22. Accessing OTN Data via OBIS	What does OBIS hold for the Ocean Tracking Network? How do I query OTN records by node, dataset, or species? How can I bring OTN occurrence data into R or Python for mapping?
08:25	23. Accessing OTN ERDDAP Data	What is ERDDAP and what kind of data does it serve? How can I query OTN datasets and download subsets for analysis? How can I bring ERDDAP data into R or Python for exploration?
08:55	24. Intro to Geospatial Data in R (sf + terra)	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?
10:10	Finish

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