Animal Movement Questions

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4
11-30-2014 01:53 PM
JenJelincic
New Contributor

I am a wildlife biologist, new to ArcGIS, and I have been trying to make it through a project that I am finding I need a lot of help with.

 

I used GPS tags that are actually for human activity on seabirds off the coast of California. These tags are called "i-gotU" (MobileAction Technology - i-gotU Official Site. ) and the model I used was the GT-120. I programmed them to record data on the bird's location every 10 minutes for 2-14 days. The idea is to figure out during the breeding season, where the birds are making their foraging trips. Our findings have shown that even though these birds breed on islands and are supposed to be foraging out at sea, they are going to areas developed by humans- from garbage dumps to parking lots. What I would like to do first is input these foraging trips into ArcGIS, showing the paths that these animals take. Then, I would like to use this information to talk about the percentage of time that the animals are spending in which areas of land (land use/cover). Can anyone help me with the steps I need to take in order to do this?

 

This is a sample of the type of data the GPS tags collect, currently saved as "gpx" files:

<name>20140604-193612(1)</name>

<desc>Color:004000ff</desc>

<trkseg>

<trkpt lat="37.698261" lon="-123.003296">

<ele>5.760000</ele>

<time>2014-06-02T18:02:34Z</time>

<speed>2.05</speed>

</trkpt>

 

Thank you so much for your time, I really appreciate anyone who is willing to read and/or help.

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4 Replies
DanPatterson_Retired
MVP Emeritus

have you imported the gps data into a form that Arcmap can use? (cant remember if Arc does, but DNRGPS does amongst others)  Where are you so far in this process?

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JenJelincic
New Contributor

Hi Dan,

I have not converted it yet, though I know I need to. I found this help page (ArcGIS Help 10.1) through ArcGIS with script for converting GPX to Features using Python, but I am not 100% sure if this is what I need to do.

Thank you for your response,

Jen

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DanPatterson_Retired
MVP Emeritus

it is a tool in Arctoolbox, there is no need to run the script as a standalone one.  Give it a try or google DNRGPS... it reads gpx files and allows you to save waypoints, tracks and routes directly to shapefiles.

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JenJelincic
New Contributor

So I ended up being able to use the GPX to Features tool in the Conversions Tools in ArcMap- I didn't realize there was a tool!

From there, I was able to input my points from GPS tags, then converted points to polylines (Points to Line tool). I imported a Land Use Raster and changed it to a polygon (Raster to polygon tool in Conversion Tools).

Using the raster as a polygon, I could use the Intersect tool to make the polyline and landuse polygon combine so that I could have columns in the Attribute Table for the lengths that they were in each type of land use.

I think the only thing I am unsure of now is whether I can do a statistical analysis in ArcMap to determine what percentage of their time is spent in each type of habitat, or if I can build a model to make predictions as to what land use type they would be at.... or if I should take what I have in ArcMap and export that information out into something else (R or MATLAB, maybe?) Do you have any suggestions?

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