Technical Note: Method to Streamline Processing of Livestock Global Positioning System Collar Data

Abstract

The use of global positioning system (GPS) technology to study livestock movement has been widely adopted in range and animal sciences; however, the methods for processing GPS collar data are varied among researchers and often involve repetitive, time-consuming steps to get data into a format available to view in geographic information system (GIS) software. The objective of this technical note is to present a method for quickly processing uniform datasets using a commonly available commercial GPS collar and Program R. Data generated by a Lotek 3300LR GPS collar were processed in seconds using “Lotek_Function,” which was developed using R coding. Traditional hand-processing of the same data generally requires 30 or more minutes and is prone to error due to the tedious, repetitive nature of the task. Due to the open-source nature of Program R, base codes can be modified to fit specific researchers’ needs when incorporating GIS data layers or models to assess behavior based on motion sensor data output from collars. © 2019 The Society for Range Management