Improve onboarding documentation

[JosiahParry]

Request: write basic "how to" intro documention either in README or vignette

Preface, I am not an ecologist nor do I study movement-models. I am an R package developer and do spatial statistics.

I'm trying to help a colleague create movement models in a reproducible manner. I am finding it rather tough to figure out how to get started with this package. While there appears to be a lot of documentation on error and parameter selection there is no documentation in simple to understand language on how to get started. For example, how do I convert a simple sf object into a telemetry object? Why do sf objects not suffice?

The documentation's examples utilize pre-created telemetry object and creates one directly from a csv file. Surely, my csv file is not a perfect match because it does not come from Movebank (the as.telemetry() function contains no examples).

[chfleming]

Hi @JosiahParry ,

The package README currently instructs first-time users to read the package paper and then the two vignettes "variogram" and "akde".

The "variogram" vignette starts out with a section on data preparation. The Movebank naming conventions are referenced there in the vignette and again in the linked as.telemetry help file, which provides a minimal list of sufficient column names under Details. I can add an example to that help file if that makes things easier to understand (there is such an example in the ctmmlearn material).

sf support is on the TODO list (and is partially coded at present). It's not currently supported because it didn't exist when I first wrote this package and it was only requested as a feature in the last year.