ezTrack

ezTrack is a lightweight R package for exploring animal tracking data. It offers a gentle, beginner-friendly workflow to go from raw telemetry data to clean summaries, interactive maps, and home range estimates with minimal data wrangling.

View the vignette

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Installation

# Install development version from GitHub
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("taylorbcraft/ezTrack")

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Key functions

ez_track() - Clean & standardize tracking data

tracking_data <- ez_track("my_tracking_file.csv")

• Auto-detects columns for id, timestamp, x, and y
• Supports CSV, Excel, shapefiles (.shp), and GeoPackages (.gpkg) files
• Also accepts data.frame, sf, Spatial*, and move objects
• Removes rows with missing or duplicate (id, timestamp) combinations
• Returns a clean data frame or (optionally) a sf object projected to WGS84
• Supports time-based subsampling (e.g., "1 per hour", "2 per day")

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ez_summary() - Quick data summary

ez_summary(tracking_data)

• Per-ID stats: duration, fixes/day, distance, speed
• Filters by date range
• Optional HTML report: ez_summary(tracking_data, report = TRUE)

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ez_fix_rate_plot() - Plot location fix rate

ez_fix_rate_plot(tracking_data)

• Displays each animal’s location fixes as tick marks over time
• Helps visualize tracking effort, data gaps, and fix frequency
• Supports date filtering and x-axis formatting options

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ez_home_range() - Estimate home ranges

ranges <- ez_home_range(tracking_data, method = "mcp", level = 95)

• Supports MCP and KDE methods
• Returns sf polygon(s)
• Estimate per animal or overall population

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ez_map() - Plot tracks on interactive Leaflet maps

ez_map(tracking_data)

• Visualize tracks, points, and home ranges
• Customize colors, radius, opacity, and labels
• Toggle between satellite and light basemaps

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ez_latitude_plot() - Plot latitude over time

ez_latitude_plot(tracking_data)

• Creates a time series plot of latitude (y-axis) over timestamp (x-axis)
• Optionally facets the plot by animal and allows customization of x-axis date format and break spacing

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Example Workflow

library(ezTrack)

# Step 1: Import
data(godwit_tracks)

# Step 2: Standardize
trk <- ez_track(godwit_tracks)

# Step 3: Summarize
ez_summary(trk)

# Step 4: Check fix rates
ez_fix_rate_plot(trk)

# Step 5: Compute home ranges
hr <- ez_home_range(trk)

# Step 6: Map tracks and home ranges
ez_map(trk, home_ranges = hr)

# Step 7: Latitude plot
ez_latitude_plot(trk)

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Dependencies

• sf, leaflet, geosphere, adehabitatHR: spatial operations, mapping, and home range analysis
• readxl: Excel import support
• knitr, kableExtra, htmltools: HTML reporting
• ggplot2, viridisLite: plotting with color palettes
• magrittr: for %>% pipe in mapping function

Install missing packages using:

install.packages(c(
  "sf", "leaflet", "geosphere", "adehabitatHR", "readxl",
  "knitr", "kableExtra", "htmltools", "ggplot2", "viridisLite", "magrittr", "dplyr"
))

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License

MIT License © 2025 Taylor Craft

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Contributing / Issues

Feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request. Suggestions welcome!