DYNAMO: Dynamic Visualization of Movement and the Environment

The aim of this project is to develop exploratory and analytical methods to explore patterns and generate new hypotheses on the relationships between animal’s movement behavior and landscape use. DYNAMO is an interactive and exploratory visualization tool that allows for the creation of intuitive, interactive, and high quality animations suitable for presentations of animal movement data. The visualization serves as a preliminary and exploratory analysis tool, allowing biologists and movement ecologists to investigate their data and identify environmental drivers of movement and potential correlations, and generate hypotheses to test. This project is supported by the the Student-Faculty Research Awards of the Dean of College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.

More info: Xavier, G., and Dodge, S. (2014). An Exploratory Visualization Tool for Mapping the Relationships between Animal Movement and the Environment. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Interacting with Maps. doi:10.1145/2677068.2677071

Albatross trajectories rendered through points and vectors coloured and scaled by wind speed, with vectors indicating wind direction.
Albatross trajectories rendered through line thickness. Color indicates direction of wind in relation to albatross (red = head wind, blue = tail wind). Thickness indicates movement speed of albatross.