Round coordinates to generalize camera trap locations

Rounds deployment coordinates to a certain number of digits to fuzzy/generalize camera trap locations. This function can be used before publishing data in order to protect sensitive species and/or prevent theft of active cameras.

Usage

round_coordinates(package, digits = 3)

Arguments

package

A Camtrap DP, as read by read_camtrap_dp().

digits

Number of decimal places to round coordinates to (1, 2 or 3).

Value

package with rounded coordinates as well as updated coordinateUncertainty.(in deployments) and coordinatePrecision (in metadata).

Details

Rounding coordinates is a recommended method to generalize sensitive biodiversity information (see Section 4.2 in Chapman 2020). Choose a number of digits that aligns with the sensitivity of the data and notice the effect on precision and uncertainty. Publish the coordinates as is (i.e. do not use this function) if the data are not sensitive.

sensitivity	digits	coordinatePrecision	coordinateUncertainty
high	1	0.1	original uncertainty + 15691 m
medium	2	0.01	original uncertainty + 1570 m
low	3	0.001	original uncertainty + 157 m

For records with coordinateUncertainty = NA the function will assume the coordinates were obtained by GPS and use 30 m as original uncertainty, before adding uncertainty caused by rounding. The added uncertainty is the largest possible value caused by rounding (see Table 3 in Chapman & Wieczorek 2020).

See also

Other publication functions: write_dwc(), write_eml()

Examples

# Round coordinates of example package to 3 digits
mica <- round_coordinates(mica, 3)

# coordinatePrecision is set in metadata
mica$coordinatePrecision
#> [1] 0.001

# coordinateUncertainty is set in data: original uncertainty (or 30) + 157 m
mica$data$deployments$coordinateUncertainty
#> [1] 187 187 187 187