[BETA TEST] New camtrapR Shiny Dashboard - Complete camera trap analysis in one application!

[Juergen Niedballa]

Hello camtrapR community,

I'm excited to announce the release of a completely overhauled Survey Dashboard for the camtrapR package! This interactive Shiny application provides a comprehensive, code-free environment for camera trap data analysis that goes well beyond the standard camtrapR functionality.

The dashboard takes a camera trap table and record table as input and handles all data preparation internally, allowing you to move seamlessly from camera trap data tables to sophisticated analyses and visualizations without writing code.

Complete Workflow

The new dashboard supports the entire analytical workflow:

1. Import your data from various formats (CSV, Wildlife Insights, camtrapDP)
2. Explore and visualize with interactive maps and summary statistics
3. Filter and process data with intuitive controls
4. Analyze species activity patterns and temporal overlap
5. Extract environmental covariates  using the new createCovariates function to automatically generate model covariates and prediction rasters from both local files and online sources (elevation / terrain data)
6. Covariate Analysis: Explore correlations and relationships between environmental variables
7. Build and compare single-species occupancy models using unmarked or ubms packages
8. Fit community occupancy models with custom random/fixed effects structures
9. Generate spatial predictions of occupancy, species richness, and PAO (percentage of area occupied)
10. Visualize model results with effect plots and interactive maps
11. Export results for reports and publications

Beta Testing

This is a beta release, and I'm seeking your help to test and improve the dashboard before the official release. You can install the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("remotes") # install first if not installed
# install.packages("R.rsp")   # install first if not installed
remotes::install_github("jniedballa/camtrapR", ref = "dev", build_vignettes = TRUE)

Launching the dashboard

Open the dashboard with 

surveyDashboard()

You can then start importing data in the Import data section. Alternatively you can use the function parameters to pass your data to the dashboard. See ?surveyDashboard for examples.

A Few Notes

• Some functionality (particularly save/load/export features) may still have issues
• If you encounter problems after filtering data and then loading new data, it's best to restart the dashboard
  
• The interface aims to be intuitive, but please share if you find any workflows confusing
• the dashboard does not include the image management or species identification aspects of camtrapR - it requires camera trap and record tables with identified species as input
  

Your Feedback is Valuable!

Whether you're an experienced R user or new to camera trap analysis, I'd love to hear about your experience with the dashboard. Your insights will help make this tool more useful for the entire camera trap research community.

Please share bugs, feature requests, or general impressions in this thread, via email or in GitHub issues.

Thank you for your support in improving camtrapR!

Jürgen Niedballa