Abstract
Incubation represents a life stage of pivotal importance for the optimal development of avian embryos. For most birds, incubation poses a trade-off between investing in self-maintenance or offspring care. Furthermore, incubation is affected by environmental temperatures and, therefore, will be likely impacted by climate change. Despite its relevance and readily available temperature logging methods, avian incubation research is hindered by recognised limitations in available software. In this paper, a new quantitative approach to analyse incubation behaviour is presented. This new approach is embedded in a free R package, incR. The core algorithm in incR is validated and it is shown that the method extracts accurate metrics of incubation behaviour (e.g. number and duration of incubation bouts). The paper also presents a suggested workflow along with detailed R code to ease the practical implementation of the new method.
