move2utils: a utility toolkit for the move2 ecosystem
- 1Department of Migration, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Radolfzell, Germany
Abstract
1. Studying animal movement at the population scale requires a stable, modern software substrate. Within R, the legacy move package supplied that substrate for over a decade, but its sp/rgeos backbone has been retired. The successor package move2 deliberately confined its scope to the data class and core movebank API functions. 2. The analytical machinery of move, namely dynamic Brownian-bridge utilisation distributions, the directional bivariate-Gaussian variant, corridor segmentation, and along-track thinning, was left to port to the modern sf/terra stack. 3. We present move2utils, an R package that completes and complements that transition. move2utils provides move2-native ports of the move analytical functions, preserves the original C kernels where they exist, and replaces the deprecated spatial scaffolding around them. It additionally ports some of the legacy R code to faster C kernels. move2utils also exposes novel outlier-detection methodology described in detail in a companion paper. 4. The package is open-source (GPL [≥] 3), is developed on the MPCDF GitLab and mirrored on GitHub for public installation, and ships with vignettes and a CI-tested check suite. We illustrate it with a worked example on real tracking data and synthetic datasets.
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BibTeX
@misc{kranstauber2026move2utils,
title = {{move2utils: a utility toolkit for the move2 ecosystem}},
author = {B. Kranstauber and K. Safi and A. K. Scharf},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = jul,
doi = {10.64898/2026.07.07.736908},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.07.736908v4},
note = {CC BY-NC},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - move2utils: a utility toolkit for the move2 ecosystem
AU - B. Kranstauber
AU - K. Safi
AU - A. K. Scharf
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/07/07
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.07.07.736908
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.07.736908v4
AB - 1. Studying animal movement at the population scale requires a stable, modern software substrate. Within R, the legacy move package supplied that substrate for over a decade, but its sp/rgeos backbone has been retired. The successor package move2 deliberately confined its scope to the data class and core movebank API functions. 2. The analytical machinery of move, namely dynamic Brownian-bridge utilisation distributions, the directional bivariate-Gaussian variant, corridor segmentation, and along-track thinning, was left to port to the modern sf/terra stack. 3. We present move2utils, an R package that completes and complements that transition. move2utils provides move2-native ports of the move analytical functions, preserves the original C kernels where they exist, and replaces the deprecated spatial scaffolding around them. It additionally ports some of the legacy R code to faster C kernels. move2utils also exposes novel outlier-detection methodology described in detail in a companion paper. 4. The package is open-source (GPL [≥] 3), is developed on the MPCDF GitLab and mirrored on GitHub for public installation, and ships with vignettes and a CI-tested check suite. We illustrate it with a worked example on real tracking data and synthetic datasets.
ER -