Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: 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. 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. 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. 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.
Authors: Bart Kranstauber, Kamran Safi, Anne K. Scharf
Language: English
Topic: Data Analysis with R
Subfield: Statistics and Probability
Field: Mathematics
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7168050766