Taylor Craft brings movement data within easier reach
A GPS tracker can collect thousands of locations from a single bird. But turning all those points into meaningful information is not always easy. Tracking data need to be cleaned, organised and visualised before they can tell us where birds travel, when they move and which places matter to them. For people without advanced data skills, these technical steps can be a major barrier. BirdEyes researcher Taylor Craft wanted to make this process easier.
Taylor is a conservation ecologist whose work brings together movement ecology, landscape monitoring and conservation, with a particular focus on Black-tailed Godwits. During his PhD with BirdEyes and the University of Groningen, he worked extensively with GPS tracking and remote-sensing data. This experience made one challenge especially clear: we are collecting valuable movement data, but exploring those data can still require considerable technical expertise.
Together with colleagues, Taylor developed ezTrack, a free, open-source R package designed to make animal-tracking data easier to explore.
Making tracking data simpler
The idea behind ezTrack is simple: make the first steps of movement-data analysis more accessible. Instead of moving between several R packages or writing large amounts of complicated code, users can import, clean, and organise their data within one workflow.
They can check data quality, calculate movement statistics, estimate the areas animals use, and create maps and other visualisations. For migratory-bird research, researchers can use these tools to see where birds travelled, when they were there, and which places they repeatedly used. Interactive maps also make these movements easier to understand and communicate. ezTrack does not aim to replace advanced movement-analysis tools. Rather, it provides an easier starting point for exploring, checking and summarising tracking data.
From godwit tracks to conservation
Taylor and his colleagues demonstrated ezTrack using tracking data from Black-tailed Godwits along the Gambia River in West Africa, where researchers knew relatively little about how godwits use the landscape.
Their analysis showed that the birds concentrated mainly along the river’s north bank and largely outside the mangrove belt. They also showed little or no use of rice fields, although rice fields are important habitats for godwits elsewhere.
Conservationists can use these insights to guide wetland conservation and plan mangrove restoration while reducing the risk of expanding restoration into areas important for godwits.
Broadening access to movement ecology
Perhaps the most important idea behind ezTrack is accessibility. Collecting more tracking data is valuable, but so is making sure people can explore and understand it.
Taylor believes ecological information should be open to everyone. As he puts it, “Ecological knowledge belongs to everyone, not only specialists.”
By lowering technical barriers, ezTrack can help students, field teams, ecologists, and conservation practitioners take a more active role in working with movement data. As a free and open-source tool, it can also support researchers with limited access to specialist training or resources.
Explore ezTrack
