Re: radiotracking data advice

[Damiano G. Preatoni]

In un messaggio del Tuesday 15 September 2009, andrea santangeli ha scritto:

> Hi all,
>
> my name is Andrea Santangeli and I´m doing a PhD in Finland on the
> Tengmalm´s owl. Hi have a lot of radiotracking data to deal with and am
> asking for some practical advice: 1) extract the real position
> (coordinates) of the owl from one observer position (in geogr. coord of the
> type:  lat: 62.98851 and long: 23.06411), distance and bearing (degrees
> from 0 to 360), either with a fomula to apply in excel or with another
> program; 2) extract the real position (coordinates) of the owl from two
> observer positions (in geogr. coord of the type:  lat: 62.98851 and long:
> 23.06411), and bearing (degrees from 0 to 360), basically a triangulation
> issue here.

Hi Andrea
  first, perhaps diong something to your point locations - such as projecting
them into a cartesian coordinate space - should be a first pass. To accomplish
that, any GIS software will do, ranging from Quantum GIS to R geographical
information system functions.

Once you have your location + bearing + distance or pair of location +
bearings, then is simple trigonometry.

The second case is covered by the code in the triang.R script (still in
development, look for the publicly available repository at
svn://home.prea.net/svn), the first is a trivial conversion from polar to
cartesian systems, again, you can find something in triang.R sourcecode.


By the way, choose your number crunching tool (i.e. a true GIS or a GIS-
capable data analysis environment) depending on what you have to do _next_,
i.e. once your location + bearing + distance or triangulation have been
transformed into owls positions... what happens? Home range calculations? (=>
R) Buffering and land use clip? ( => QGis with R in the backoffice).


Hope this help!

--
You plan things that you do not even attempt because of your extreme caution.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Damiano G. Preatoni, PhD

Unità di Analisi e Gestione delle Risorse Ambientali
Dipartimento Ambiente-Salute-Sicurezza
Università degli Studi dell'Insubria
Via J.H. Dunant, 3 - 21100 Varese (ITALY)

tel [phone] fax [phone]
http://biocenosi.dipbsf.uninsubria.it/
ICQ: 78690321 jabber: prea@... skype: prea.net
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