AniMove - Animal Movements

A collaborative project

The analysis of animal movement and ranging behaviour (including the estimation of home range size) is a complex issue. A number of programs have been written (see this web site for an incomplete list), but all suffer from one or several limitations, including:

limited customizability (for ad hoc analyses, change of calculation methods, etc.)
undocumented calculation methods (crucial especially for kernel analyses)
limited or no interaction with Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
the need to purchase proprietary, expensive software

We believe the problem could be solved by the use of several free and open source programs:

the statistical program R for calculations (kernel, minimum convex polygon, etc.)
GRASS and QuantumGIS for GIS analyses and display
optionally, PostgreSQL for data storage, selection and retrieval

All software is available both for Linux and Windows operating systems (and usually also for Mac OSX). We aim at producing the most advanced software; our indicative term of reference is Animal Movements (which requires, however the expensive ArcView + Spatial Analyst proprietary packages).

All resulting software is and will be freely available (under GPL or similar licences).

Where have we got?

Quite far indeed! It is now possible to run sophisticated kernel, minimum convex polygon, and local nearest-neighbor convex-hull analyses from an entirely graphic GIS environment. See our collaborative page for updates.

We also maintain a web page with instructions to set up the system and run the analyses.

Join the group!

AniMove lives thanks to the efforts of many people, which contributed through time. Your help would therefore be much appreciated. This could be a suitable project for a MSc thesis.
You can collaborate by testing the software, writing manuals and other info on our collaborative pages (wikis: State of the art, HowTo, Wishlist), and writing code.
Please subscribe to the mailing list or write us if you are interested.

Faunalia provides ongoing support to the project.