library(move2)

User credentials

The credentials of the user are stored using the keyring package. With the following command a user can be added to the keyring. Run this line once, it will store your credentials in keyring. After that every time you load move2 and execute a download function from movebank, these functions will retrieve your credentials from keyring.

movebank_store_credentials("myUserName", "myPassword")

movebank_remove_credentials()
#> There is 1 key removed from the keyring.

The keyring package can use several mechanisms to store credentials, these are called backends. Some of these backends are operating system dependent, others are more general. Some of the operating systems dependent backends have the advantage that they do not require providing credentials when opening a new R session.

The move2 package uses the default backend as is returned by keyring::default_backend(), this function thus shows the backend move2 is using. If you want to change the default you can use the keyring_backend option, for more details see the documentation in the keyring package.

macOS and Windows generally do not require entering an extra password for keyring. The default in Linux is often the file backend which can be confusing as it creates an encrypted file with credentials that need a password to unlock. In this case a separate password for the keyring file has to be entered for each new R session before the movebank password can be accessed. To avoid having to enter each time a keyring password the Secret Service API can be used by installing the libsecret library. (Debian/Ubuntu: libsecret-1-dev; Recent RedHat, Fedora and CentOS systems: libsecret-devel)

Handling multiple Movebank accounts - use `key_name`

If you have multiple user accounts on movebank, the easiest way is to give each of them a key name with the argument key_name. For the most used account also the default option can be used. The movebank_store_credentials() only has to be executed once for each account. After that the credentials will be retrieved from keyring.

## store credentials for the most used account.
movebank_store_credentials("myUserName", "myPassword")

## store credentials for another movebank account
movebank_store_credentials("myUserName_2", "myPassword_2", key_name = "myOtherAccount")

When you want to download from Movebank using your default movebank account, nothing has to be specified before the download functions. If you want to download from Movebank with another account, than you should execute the line below, specifying the key name of the account to use, before the download functions are executed.

options("move2_movebank_key_name" = "myOtherAccount")

If in one script/Rsession you are using several accounts, to use the credentials of the default account execute the line below:

options("move2_movebank_key_name" = "movebank")

To check which accounts are stored in keyring:

keyring::key_list()
#   service           username
# 1 movebank          myUserName
# 2 myOtherAccount    myUserName_2

The service column corresponds to the names provided in key_name. The account entered without a key name (the default) will be called movebank. Note that the key names have to be unique, if there are several usernames with the same key name (service), it will cause an error.

Removing user credentials from keyring

To deleted credentials from keyring:

## for the default account
movebank_remove_credentials()
#> There is 1 key removed from the keyring.

## for an account with a key name
movebank_remove_credentials(key_name = "myOtherAccount")
#> There is 1 key removed from the keyring.

Next we can check if the keys are successfully removed:

keyring::key_list()

Here you can check if the movebank service is successfully removed.

Downloading data

library(dplyr)

Study information

Using the function movebank_download_study_info it is possible to download information for all studies, for all studies that have certain property or for a single study. Any column of the table can be used to download only the information of the studies that comply with the selected property. This table contains all the information that can be seen on the “Study page” on the Movebank webpage, plus additional information about download rights and ownership.

NOTE: due to incorrect timestamps in some Movebank studies, the function movebank_download_study_info() sometimes returns a Warning message as the one in the example below. You can ignore this (see issue #17).

For all studies

movebank_download_study_info()

This code took: 0.000561 [s]

All studies where you have access to download the data

movebank_download_study_info(i_have_download_access = TRUE)

All studies where you are owner of the data

movebank_download_study_info(i_am_owner = TRUE)

All studies with a creative commons zero license are returned. These are a good candidate for exploration and testing

movebank_download_study_info(license_type = "CC_0")

For a specific study

movebank_download_study_info(id = 2911040)

Individual, tag and deployment information

The function movebank_download_deployment downloads a table with the associated information to individuals, tags and deployments. This table reassembles the “Reference Data” table that can be downloaded from the Movebank webpage.

movebank_download_deployment("Galapagos Albatrosses")

This code took: 0.000478 [s]

Location & non-location data (Event data)

With the function movebank_download_study the complete study from Movebank can be downloaded. There are many options to download a subset of the complete study. The study_id can either be specified either as an integer or character with respectively the id or name of the study.

To get the study ID of a Movebank study use movebank_get_study_id

movebank_get_study_id(study_id = "Galapagos Albatrosses")

This code took: 0.000451 [s]

Download an entire study (all data of all sensors)

movebank_download_study_info(study_id = 2911040)$sensor_type_ids
movebank_download_study(
  study_id = 2911040,
  sensor_type_id = c("gps", "acceleration")
)

This code took: 0.00047 [s]

Download gps data of one individual

movebank_download_study(
  study_id = "Galapagos Albatrosses",
  sensor_type_id = "gps",
  individual_local_identifier = "unbanded-160"
)

This code took: 0.000477 [s]

Download gps data for multiple individuals

movebank_download_study(
  study_id = 2911040,
  sensor_type_id = "gps",
  individual_local_identifier = c("1094-1094", "1103-1103")
)

This code took: 0.000461 [s]

## it is also possible to use the numerical identifiers
movebank_download_study(
  study_id = 2911040,
  sensor_type_id = "gps",
  individual_id = c(2911086, 2911065)
)

Download acceleration data of one or several individuals

movebank_download_study(2911040,
  sensor_type_id = "acceleration",
  individual_local_identifier = "1094-1094"
)

This code took: 0.000456 [s]

Note that the sensor_type_id can either be specified either as an integer or character with respectively the ‘id’ or ‘external_id’ of the sensor. Here is how you get the correspondence table of sensor name and id:

movebank_retrieve(entity_type = "tag_type")

Download data of a specific time window and sensor. The timestamp_* arguments can either be formatted as a POSIXct timestamp, Date or a character string (e.g. "20080604133046000"(yyyyMMddHHmmssSSS)). The timestamp_* arguments can also be used separately.

movebank_download_study(2911040,
  sensor_type_id = "gps",
  timestamp_start = as.POSIXct("2008-08-01 00:00:00"),
  timestamp_end = as.POSIXct("2008-08-02 00:00:00")
)

This code took: 0.000444 [s]

Reduce columns downloaded to a minimal set (only for location data). By default all attributes are downloaded, but to speed up download, the argument attributes = NULL can be used as it reduces the columns to download to the bare minimum. All individual attributes are downloaded as this does not take much time. Note that this option should only be used when downloading location data (by specifying the sensor), as only timestamps, location and track id is downloaded.

movebank_download_study(1259686571, sensor_type_id = 653, attributes = NULL)

This code took: 0.00046 [s]

Download only specific attributes. If only specific attributes want to be download you can state them in the argument attributes. The available attributes vary between studies and sensors. You can retrieve the list of available attributes for a specific sensor in given study. Note that only one sensor at a time can be stated.

## get all attributes available for a specific study and sensor
movebank_retrieve(
  entity_type = "study_attribute",
  study_id = 2911040,
  sensor_type_id = "gps"
)$short_name

movebank_download_study(
  study_id = 2911040,
  sensor_type_id = "gps",
  attributes = c("height_above_ellipsoid", "eobs_temperature")
)

This code took: 0.000462 [s]

Advanced usage

For specific request it might be useful to directly retrieve information from the Movebank API. The movebank_retrieve function provides this functionality. The first argument is the entity type you would like to retrieve information for (e.g. tag or event). A study id is always required and other arguments make it possible to select. For more details how to use the api see the documentation.

Downloading undeployed data

One common reason to use this options is to retrieve undeployed locations. In some cases a set of locations is collected before the tag attached to the animal for quality control or error measurements. The example below shows how all records for a specific tag can be retrieved. Filtering for locations where the deployment_id is NA, returns those locations that were collected while the tag was not deployed. The timestamp_start and timestamp_end might be good argument to filter down the data even more in the call to movebank_retrieve. By omitting the argument tag_local_identifier the entire study can downloaded. With the argument sensor_type_id the sensors can be specified.

movebank_retrieve("event",
  study_id = 1259686571,
  tag_local_identifier = "193967",
  attributes = "all"
) %>%
  filter(is.na(deployment_id))

This code took: 0.000476 [s]

Downloading data from movebank