getMovebank: Download Data from Movebank

Description

An enhanced function to download information of studies, animals, deployments and tags, and sensor measurements from Movebank. Many of the options of this function have been included as separate more user friendly functions listed in the See Also section below.

Usage

# S4 method for character,MovebankLogin
getMovebank(entity_type , login, ...)

Value

'data.frame'

Arguments

entity_type

character. The entity type to download from movebank, possible options are: "tag_type", "study", "tag", "individual", "deployment" or "event". See 'Details' for more information.

login

a MovebankLogin object, if empty you'll be asked to enter your username and password.

...

Arguments passed on to the Movebank API:

i_am_owner: logical. If TRUE all studies the user is a data manager for will be returned. Optional.

study_id

numeric. It is the Movebank ID of the study. It can be obtained on the Study Details page on Movebank or with getMovebankID.

individual_id

numeric. It is the internal individual Movebank identifier. A single individual or a vector of several individuals from the same study can be specified. It corresponds to the id values of getMovebank("individual", login, study_id). Optional.

deployment_id

numeric. It is the deployment Movebank identifier. A single deployment or a vector of several deployments from the same study can be specified. It corresponds to the id values of getMovebank("deployment", login, study_id). Optional.

sensor_type_id

numeric. It is the numeric id of the sensor type. A single sensor type or a vector of several sensor types can be specified. The corresponding numeric id for each sensor type can be found through getMovebank("tag_type", login). To obtain the sensor types available in the study use getMovebankSensors. Optional.

attributes

character. A single attribute, a vector of attributes or "all" can be specified. Optional. See 'Details' for more information.

timestamp_start, timestamp_end

character or POSIXct. Starting and/or ending timestamp to download the data for a specific time period. Timestamps have to be provided in format 'yyyyMMddHHmmssSSS'. If POSIXct then it is converted to character using UTC as a time zone, note that this can change the time. Optional.

Author

Marco Smolla & Anne Scharf

Details

getMovebank("tag_type", login): returns all sensor types in Movebank and their corresponding sensor id. See also getMovebankSensors.
getMovebank("study", login): returns all studies where the user has permission to see the data. You may have permission to see only the study details, view some or all tracks but not download data, or view and download some or all data. Also, there are studies that you do not have permission to see at all, these studies will not be included in this list. See also getMovebankStudies.
getMovebank("study", login, i_am_owner=T): returns all studies where the user is a data manager.
getMovebank("study", login, study_id): returns a summary of information about one or more studies. See also getMovebankStudy.
getMovebank("tag", login, study_id): returns tag reference information from a study. See also getMovebankReferenceTable.
getMovebank("individual", login, study_id): returns animal reference information from a study. See also getMovebankAnimals, getMovebankReferenceTable.
getMovebank("deployment", login, study_id): returns deployment reference information from a study. See also getMovebankReferenceTable.
getMovebank("event", login, study_id,...): returns the sensor measurements from a study. See also getMovebankData, getMovebankLocationData, getMovebankNonLocationData.

The default columns of getMovebank("event", login,study_id,...) are timestamp, location_lat, location_long, individual_id, tag_id. If the downloaded study only contains GPS data, these default columns are suitable, but for all other sensors, additional columns are required. The columns available vary among sensor type and tag manufacturer, the complete list of available attributes for a specific study can be obtained with: getMovebankSensorsAttributes(study, login=login). If attributes="all" than all attributes that are present in the study will be downloaded.

The definitions of the content of the columns is detailed in the Attribute Dictionary on Movebank