System Requirements - Home Range Extension and Tools for ArcGIS

The text of this page is largely taken from Rodgers & Carr (2001) with their permission.

Introduction

BlueSky Telemetry™ aims to provide the wildlife biologist with as many resources as possible. Part of that effort includes the freely accessible database of references of all papers published since 1980 that have used radio-telemetry techniques. Additionally, BlueSky Telemetry™ has obtained permission from Dr. Art Rodgers and Angus Carr of the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources in Canada to provide an additional download site for the home range analysis program "Home Range Extension" (HRE) to ArcView®GIS. This is a freely available download and BlueSky Telemetry™ is providing a mirror of the home site at http://blue.lakeheadu.ca/hre/.

HRE extends ArcView®GIS to analyse the home range of animals. Although there has been a proliferation of home range analysis software, many of the older DOS based programs employ a cumbersome interface that require batch files or data manipulation to be carried out with text editors or database programs (Rodgers & Carr 2001). Most other programs do not include more recent home range models (e.g. kernel methods) and many do not allow export of home range polygons to a GIS for habitat analyses, or restrict analyses to fewer than 1,000 animal locations at a time. Although these limitations may be acceptable to studies involving conventional radio-tracking of animals, automated equipment such as GPS-based telemetry systems (Rodgers et al. 1996) can easily generate enormous quantities of data that cannot be entirely analysed by these previous programs. The ability to use large datasets and carry out all required home-range analysis within a single software environment was the primary reason for developing the HRE within the ArcView®GIS.

Minimum system Requirements

The software has been written specifically as an Extension to the Geographic Information System (GIS) software ArcView®GIS provided by ESRI. HRE requires ArcView 9 running under Windows XP.

Data Types supported by the HRE

HRE provides direct import of data from Service Argos Data Collection and Location System (DCLS) files, dBase and Excel database files or ASCII text files. Collars provided by BlueSky Telemetry™ download data directly into Microsoft Excel which can be read directly into HRE.

Data quantity is unlimited within HRE. Multiple files for individual animals can be merged and duplicate records are checked automatically. Habitat data based on satellite imagery, aerial photography or other maps can be added as different themes within ArcView®GIS (Figure 1).




Figure 1 Example of HRE within ArcView®GIS displaying data of a sheep tracked using a GPS collar. The different coloured polygons represent different plant communities available to the sheep. Data collected at two second intervals over a 120 second period every two hours. 

Data Analysis with the HRE

Display travel and calculation of Interfix Times and Distances

Home range calculation including minimum convex polygon (MCP) and kernel techniques. Because different computer software programs may produce large differences in home range estimates based on these models (Lawson and Rodgers 1997), HRE provides many of the options offered in earlier programs including:

Acknowledgments

"Home Range Extension" (HRE) for ArcView®GIS was developed by Arthur R. Rodgers and Angus P. Carr at the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources' Centre for Northern Forest Ecosystem Research in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. The program was first released in 1998 and the most recent version was produced in September 2002.

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