RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 incR: a new R package to analyse incubation behaviour
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 232520
DO 10.1101/232520
A1 Pablo Capilla-Lasheras
YR 2018
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/03/25/232520.abstract
AB Incubation represents a life stage of crucial importance for the optimal development of avian embryos. For most birds, incubation poses a trade-off between investing in self-maintenance and 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 flexibility of the R environment eases the analysis, validation and visualisation of incubation temperature data. The core algorithm in incR is validated here and it is shown that the method extracts accurate metrics of incubation behaviour (e.g. number and duration of incubation bouts). This paper also presents a suggested workflow along with detailed R code to aid the practical implementation of incR.