Group15 Proposal

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Motivation

Animal migration has long received much attention as a research topic in biology. Information about animal movement serves to allow us to understand animal behavior and their interactions with each other and the environment. In addition, it allows us to address environmental challenges such as climate and land use change.

Understanding animal migration helps conservationists to conserve these animals through the protection of their habitats and their resources.

An interactive visual analytics approach would provide valuable insights to the scientific community on the migration of these animals.

Objective

We present a interactive visual approach to explore and analyze animal movement data. We applied this approach to a data set of Osprey bird migration flows for a ten-year period spanning 2007 to 2017.

Through this project, we hope that ecologists and conservationists alike will be able to gain insights into the following:

• Bird migration (both as a group and individual) flight path over a period of time.
• How differences in individual characteristics (e.g. female vs male, juvenile vs adult) affect flight behavior.
• The home range and territory range of these birds.
• Uniqueness of stopover sites.
• Impact of environment data on bird migration.

Methodology

Time Series Analysis

Calendar Chart

The Calendar Chart will be used to explore the cycle, variability and trend of the migration data. From the calendar chart, a user can see the entire duration of either a group or the individual bird’s journey over the required time period as desired.

Line Chart

We will use the line chart based on the time, such as year, month, day and hour, to further explore the flight pattern of group and individuals, as well as how differences in individual characteristics such as sex and adulthood affect flight pattern.

Scatter Plot

Scatter plots show how much one variable is affected by another. It allows us to find out the correlation between them. In addition, it helps to identify outliers in the data set.

Geographic Analysis

Map

Various different map views will provide the visualization of the locations which the birds visit during the duration of their flight path.

Bin Chart

The bin chart will show the amount of time birds spend at each place. Coloring will be used to differentiate the time period, so that the user is able to tell the location at which the bird spends the longest time at.

Data Sets

1. Bird migration data “Osprey North and South America” available at:
https://www.movebank.org/panel_embedded_movebank_webapp

2. Environment data “Osprey North and South America” set available at:
https://www.movebank.org/panel_embedded_movebank_webapp

Tools selection/package

1. ggplot2
ggplot2 is a system for creating graphics, based on The Grammar of Graphics. Here we are going to use the ggplot2 to make the calendar chart, line chart and scatter plot.

2. gganimate
gganimate is a package based on the ggplot2. It can show an animation of a ggplot2 object that contains a frame aesthetic. The frame aesthetic will determine which frame the animation is shown in.

3. ggmap
ggmap is a package to show the spatial data visualization. It can retrieve various online sources (e.g. Google Maps) for user to download and use as layers within the ggplot2 plotting system.

4. circos
circular plot shows Osprey migration flows for the ten-year period 2007 to 2017, classified into a manageable set of related world regions.

5. move
move is a R package for accessing movebank data and visualize and statistically analyze animal movement data. It is useful to build the animal tracking model and help answer ecology questions.

6. tibbletime
tibble package is an extension to partition an index column by time and change the periodicity of a time-based tibble. This allows easily changing from a daily dataset to a monthly or yearly dataset.

7. lubridate
lubridate is an R package that makes it easier to work with dates and times. It can easily handle the timestamps including both the date and time to help address time series problems.