Concepts

Introduction

What is wildRtrax?

wildRtrax, pronounced ‘wilder tracks’, is an R package for ecologists and advanced users who work with environmental sensor data, mainly from autonomous recordings units (ARUs). It contains functions designed to meet most needs in order to organize, analyze and standardize data to the WildTrax infrastructure. wildRtrax is self-contained and must be run under an R statistical environment, and it also depends on many other R packages. wildRtrax is free software and distributed under MIT License (c) 2020.

What is WildTrax?

WildTrax is a web-enabled portal designed to manage, store, process, and share this environmental sensor data and transform it into biological data. It was developed by the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute and the Bioacoustic Unit. wildRtrax serves as a parallel design and indicator to analytics and functions that can be developed in WildTrax.

What R packages does wildRtrax depend on?

wildRtrax depends on a multitude of packages to provide flexible routines and work flows for data management. tidyverse for piping functions, standard grammar and tidy data manipulation, furrr and doParallel for parallel computing, and acoustic analysis packages: bioacoustics, tuneR, seewave. Certain functions are indebted to the QUT Ecoacoustics Analysis Software software package as well.

Do I need to know any other programming langugages in order to use wildRtrax?

Certain functions rely on Python and bash scripts and some SQL. You do not need to know the languages in order to use the functions but it’s encouraged to read the documentation.

How do I report a bug in wildRtrax?

If you think you have found a bug in wildRtrax, you should report it to developers or maintainers. Please do not send bug reports to R mailing lists, since wildRtrax is not a standard R package. The preferred forum to report bugs is GitHub. Here is what is required in order to report a bug - issues are welcome and encouraged and are the only way to make wildRtrax non-buggy:

  • The bug report should be so detailed that the bug can be replicated and corrected
  • Send an example that causes a bug
  • Send a minimal data set as well if it is not available in R
  • Paste the output or error message in your message
  • Specify which version of wildRtrax you used

Can I contribute to wildRtrax?

Yes! wildRtrax is dependent on user contribution and all feedback is welcome. If you have problems with wildRtrax, it may be as simple as incomplete documentation. Feature requests also are welcome, but they are not necessarily fulfilled. A new feature will be added if it is easy to do and it looks useful to the user base of the package, or if you submit fully annotated code.

See here[] for more information.

Disclaimers

The pronoun “you” throughout the book refers to the reader. “We” refers to the wildRtrax team in general.