Announcement: new functionalities in camtrapR

[Juergen Niedballa]

Hello everyone,

I'd like to announce some major novelties in the GitHub version of camtrapR (v2.1.1).

1) there is a new function communityModel() to flexibly create community (multi-species) occupancy models for JAGS and Nimble. It will create model code, sets parameters to monitor and initial values, gathers model input data, and bundles all that in a "commOccu" object. Once can flexibly define model structure.

Furthermore there are fit(), predict(), plot_effects() and plot_coef() methods for these commOccu objects. See the new vignette 5 for examples and details:

https://jniedballa.github.io/camtrapR/articles/camtrapr5.html

It is still under development and a bit experimental, so please report back if unexpected things happen, and don't be surprised if things are still changing in the future.

2) camtrapR now supports multiple hierarchy levels in species tags. See "Cat" below:

I hope this will give you more freedom and can help keep the species list tidy compared to the previous restriction to a tag structure like this:

The old structure will still work like before though and you don't need to change anything in your existing code. I have not yet tested it with individual IDs.

On a side note, each tag can have a custom icon as in the first example above. This can be done in the Tag manager, but is not valid outside digiKam and the icons will not be saved in the metadata. But it might be helpful in tagging images

3) the new version uses static vignettes, so installation from GitHub is now via:

install_github("jniedballa/camtrapR", build_vignettes = TRUE)

I hope I can push this to CRAN early next year.

Wishing you all a happy holiday season!

Jürgen