Receiver Animations Metadata

Background

This application was developed by the SC Department of Natural Resources to visualize the seasonal occurrence and spatial distribution for marine species (acoustically-tagged by numerous research groups) when those animals occurred in coastal waters off of SC and GA. The acoustic receiver detection data presented in the viewer is aggregated by species and month, which was done to convey trends without disclosing details about individual transmitters which are the analytical property of the taggers.

Data

Source data for all animations are the sum of species days of detection at a given receiver location for each species in each month; detection frequency data were standardized to this metric to avoid bias associated with highly resident individuals. Because species days could be attributed to multiple days of data for a few individuals or only one day of data for numerous individuals, we did not produce animations for species with less than 30 total ‘species days’ of source data. As such, animations cannot be viewed for all detected species in the study.

Animations

The animations were developed by Tanner Arrington and Erin Koch using ArcGIS Desktop software and the ArcGIS JavaScript API v3.17 for web development. The general workflow for how the data were formatted and how you can create a viewer for your time-enabled data is outlined below. If you have further questions about our time-enabled data and web animations, please contact Erin Koch.

How to animate your data

Any dataset that has both spatial and temporal variables can be animated with ArcGIS. Each record should have a location and a date (or date and time). Once your data are in ArcGIS, the table should have a field with the Date data type, which is a datetime object rather than just a text representation of a date. ArcGIS Desktop provides tools for converting text representations of dates into datetime objects.

Set up the time properties for your dataset in ArcGIS Desktop. A detailed description on the time properties is found here. This is where you set the time extents and intervals for each time step in the animation. You must complete this step before you can publish your data to ArcGIS Online or Server in order to use the time settings with the web service. Once your time properties are set, you can animate the data in ArcGIS Desktop using the time slider tool.

You need to publish your data as a service to either ArcGIS Online or ArcServer to create a animations for the web. Once the datasets are hosted, there are two routes for creating a web map that animates the time-enabled data. You can use the existing time slider widget through the Web App Builder on ArcGIS Online. This option does not require any custom coding. You can also use the ArcGIS JavaScript API to build a custom web app, which has options for using and customizing the time slider widget.

Contact Information

If you have general questions about this project, please contact:

Dr. Michael D. Arendt, Assistant Marine Scientist,
Marine Resources Research Institute, Marine Division of SC Department of Natural Resources
Email: ArendtM@dnr.sc.gov
Address: 217 Fort Johnson Road
Charleston, SC 29412
Phone: 843-953-9097

If you have technical questions regarding this application, please contact:

Tyler Brown, GIS Manager
SC Department of Natural Resources
Email: BrownTy@dnr.sc.gov
Address: 1000 Assembly Street, Suite 118
Columbia, SC 29201
Phone: 803-734-3162


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