What VMStools can do for you

Introduction

Vmstools is an open-source software package build in R. It is specifically developed to process, analyse and visualize logbooks and VMS data.

Details

Some of its functionality:

• Analyses use standardised data formats for logbook (EFLALO) and VMS (TACSAT)
• Handles erroneous data point detection and removal
• Link logbook and VMS data together in order to distinguish fishing from other activities
• Provide high-resolution maps of both fishing effort and -landings, interpolate vessel tracks
• Calculate indicators of fishing impact as listed under the Data Collection Framework at different spatio-temporal scales.
• Prepare data for FishFrame submission
• Link other spatial data to VMS and logbook data

System Requirements

You will need the following software to use the VMStools software and repository.

• R (version 4.x.x) for your system. Available here.
• The VMStools package itself, available for download here
• For very enthusiastic users / developers: An SVN (subversion) client. For Windows users, we recommend TortoiseSVN. Linux users will typically have access to such a client through their package distribution system.
• Some way to write and edit R code. For Windows, try RStudio or Tinn-R. For Linux, you almost certaintly already have Vi

Getting the Code for enthusiastic users / developers

Once you've got all the necessary bits and pieces, the next step is to fetch a "working copy" of the VMStools repository from the server. The SVN client that you have installed takes care of this. The general process is client specific, but generally involves two steps

1. Create a directory for your working copy (e.g. Desktop/VMStools) and
2. "Checking out" the repository.

We'll assume you can handle 1 and 2. yourself, but number 3. is a bit trickier, and is of course dependent on your SVN client. There are a number of good resources available e.g. for windows

Firstly there are two different ways to checkout the code, depending on whether you want to commit the changes back to the repository or not. If you checkout the repository from https://github.com/nielshintzen/vmstools it will not be possible to commit your changes back - however, the benefit is that anyone can get access to the repository.

Installing the VMStools package

Download the VMStools zip or rar file from the repository under the download tab or build it yourself from the repository. Please note that the VMStools package depends on a number of other R packages. They are listed in the DESCRIPTION file in /trunk of the repository. The packages VMStools depends on can easily be installed through:

vmstoolsPackages <-  c("data.table","doBy","lubridate","sf","mixtools","segmented","ggplot2")

for(i in vmstoolsPackages)       try(install.packages(pkgs=i,repos=getOption("repos")))```

Once you've installed all secondary packages install VMStools using ```
install.packages("yourPath/vmstools.zip")```