Home range analysis plugin for QGIS

Therefore, there is no need to be either a programmer or an R expert to take benefit of R speed and accuracy in location data elaboration.

Installation

Make sure that all plugin dependencies are satisfied: see INSTALL file for details.
Then,

1. search HomeRange_plugin in Plugin Installer plugin list (enable 3rd party repositories, that include Faunalia repository)
2. load it via QGIS Plugin Manager...

Usage

Home range estimation is run on animal point locations, obtained from homing-in, triangulation, sightings, or any technique capable to generate point locations.
Play with the AniMov sample dataset to get used to the different estimators: MCP (minimum convex polygon) and different kernels (fixed h, LSCV, adjusted h).
All estimators require at least 5 relocations for each subset (i.e. each animal, or animal within a particular timespan...) to be run, otherwise R error is raised.

Examples

• Add to a QGIS project the AniMov sample dataset.
  There is no need to visualize it in QGIS: the plugin will look through QGIS legend to pick up candidate layers for analysis. If you have large datasets, you will spare time by working on huge datasets without waiting for the points to regenerate on screen...
• Go to Plugins>Home range analysis and click MCP. The Minimum convex Polygon dialog will appear in the middle of the screen.
• Specify input data in the first section of the dialog, called Source data: choose a (point) layer from the combobox, then choose a column in the layer's attribute table that will be used to group points (e.g. the unique identifier for each animal).
• Set the analysis parameters in the section below. For MCP analysis, just choose the percentage of fixes to include in the polygon calculation.
• Specify the output settings in the lower dialog section, named Output. First, choose a folder where to store results. Home ranges will be created as ESRI shapefiles, and named automatically using the source data name, the estimator name and the settings used for analysis.
  Check Force overwrite to allow the plugin to overwrite previous results of identical analyses. This will not happen if source data, settings and output folder are different, or Force overwrite is not checked.
  Check Add result layer(s) to the project if you want the plugin to automatically add the analysis results to your current QGIS project.
  Choose how the results will be saved, picking one of the Export mode possibilities: One shapefile with all homeranges will create a single shapefile containing all results for a given estimator, One shapefile per homerange will split results into N subsets (i.e. N shapefiles), one for each unique identifier value, whereas Both will do both a single shapefile and N subsets.
  If you have lot of subsets, it will take long to both export one shapefile per subset and show it in the map.

Bugs

-- to be completed --

FAQ

-- to be completed --

Web page

Page on QGIS wiki

Credits

adehabitat: Analysis of habitat selection by animals

by Clement Calenge, contributions from Mathieu Basille, Stephane Dray and Scott Fortmann-Roe (CRAN package index)

The AniMove Project

AniMove home page, hosted at Faunalia