Research Methods in Life Sciences Commons^™

Rcrab: An R Analytics Tool To Visualize And Analyze The Movement Of Horseshoe Crabs In Long Island Sound, Ismael Youssef, Samah Senbel, Jo-Marie Kasinak, Jennifer Mattei

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

Mark-recapture programs are important for studying the ecology and population dynamics of wildlife. An R shiny analytics tool was developed to track the movement of horseshoe crabs in Long Island Sound based on tag and resight data. The crabs were tagged and recaptured by volunteers of Project Limulus, a community-based research program. The dataset contains tag and recapture location information for 14,065 horseshoe crabs over 18 years. The dataset was initially cleaned by removing records with missing, duplicate or incorrect data. A new data structure was developed to save the data and simplify processing: Three dimensions were used, one for …