Motus R Book - Tutorial Question

Analysis and Data Motus R Package
1

As a volunteer for a local nature center I’ve been getting data off the SensorGnome, uploading it, and that’s about it. I’m now trying to validate that the data actually is good or has detection’s for migrating birds.

I figured the path to that knowledge goes through me getting up to speed with R. I’m now a few hours into that Motus R Book tutorial and I can’t even validate that the sample data project (176) even has detection data in it.

All commands seem to execute properly, but the file I have locally now project-176.motus at 220KB in size doesn’t really seem to have any actual data in it at all. In fact thinking I’d done something wrong I started over several times and came to the same point. In section 3.8 the tellme command is introduced that would allow to validate what data might be available for download. A version of that command will even allow evaluation if you haven’t downloaded any data yet.

tellme(projRecv = proj.num, new = TRUE)

I ran that command after starting a new R session and deleting all pre-existing downloads centered on project 176. (Effectively started from scratch.) The results of the tellme command for project 176 were a bunch of zeros. (See attached.)

I guess I’m at ground zero. Hoping for some help to nudge me in the right direction so I can progress through the guide with actual data to show me how these commands work.

Thanks for any help.

R-Sample.PNG

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Hi Ben,

I cannot guarantee that the function tellme would actually work for project 176. We’ve created some exceptions to allow downloading sample data, but I would have to confirm if those work in the tellme function. I expect we overlooked this.

To download the data, you should use tagme(176, update=TRUE). I think the user name and passwords are motus.sample. They should be in the book.

Tellme is meant to check whether the server has any additional data that your database do not yet have. So even if it worked for the sample project, it would give you zero if your local copy was already up to date.

With tagme, you can also create an object that you can use to query the data using dplyr functions. Those are explained in the book as well.

sql.motus ← tagme(176)

Cheers!

Denis Lepage

Denis Lepage dlepage@bsc-eoc.org

Senior Director, Data Science and Technology

Bird Studies Canada

PO Box 160, Port Rowan, ON N0E 1M0

519-586-3531 x155

Avibase: https://avibase.bsc-eoc.org

eBird Canada http://ebird.ca/

Motus Wildlife Tracking System: https://motus.org

NatureCounts: https://naturecounts.ca

3

This helped. Thank you. I was able to get the sample data working and keep moving through the tutorial.