by Sondra Turjeman
What
ATLAS (Advanced Tracking and Localization of Animals in real-life Systems: this and this) workshops on (1) movement data handling and filtration and (2) relevant movement models.
Who
Emmanuel Lourie, Sivan Margalit, and Dr. Yotam Orchan from Prof Ran Nathan’s Movement Ecology Lab and the Minerva Center for Movement Ecology, with CIDR’s Yuli Slavutsky
Why
Because for some ecologists, particularly those seasoned in field work, analysis of big data can be overwhelming. For those with modeling experience, a discussion of available techniques, best analysis practices, and common pitfalls is always relevant. Further, these workshops facilitate cross-research-group discussions and collaborative projects.
Fast stats
Workshop | Participants | Labs | Countries |
1. Data preparation | 36 | 8 | Israel, Netherlands, UK, Germany |
2. Analysis and modeling | 42 | 9 | Israel, Netherlands, UK, China |
Tell me more
The first ATLAS workshop dealt with the technical side of preparing movement data before analysis. Participants were walked through two stand-alone tutorials to guide them in different filtering methods, evaluating different data-cleaning decisions and, finally, calculating various movement metrics. Following the tutorials was a lecture by Pratik Gupte (from Allert Bijleveld’s Lab) about the ATLAS system in the Netherlands and a discussion about code sharing between ATLAS users. This lively discussion was a workshop highlight!
The second ATLAS workshop focused on the theoretical and practical side of movement data analyses with presentations by movement ecologists who use a diverse set of analysis tools from network building to clustering to hypothesis testing using null movement models. A lot of focus was given to how to build an ecologically relevant null model, and examples were given from studies of birds, reptiles, fish, and mammals.
From these workshops came the motivation to work on a collaborative paper led by Pratik that will address advanced methodologies for dealing with high-throughput movement data (comparing different methods from various tracking systems). In addition, the paper will discuss dealing with noisy ATLAS data.
Recordings of the workshops are available from Yotam: yotam.orchan (at) mail.huji.ac.il.