Ranges Overview

Ranges now opens with what was known as the Input & Graphics screen in previous versions where users can create, import, modify and export data and view both input and output data numerically and graphically. Types of files that can be viewed in Ranges are summarised here: File Types

Buttons along the top allow the user to access the other areas of Ranges, opening windows that can be moved and resized, as follows:

• About gives details on your licence, the Ranges version and how to contact us.
• Location performs analyses on location files, including inter-location measurements and estimates of home ranges based on concave and convex polygons, ellipses, cluster analysis and harmonic mean and kernel contouring. It also provides midline analysis used particularly for analysing the movements of fish in rivers.
• Overlap analyses and displays the overlap of range edges created in Location Analysis. There are options to create and view an overlap matrix which records the overlap of the ranges within an edge file.
• Interaction analyses spatial interactions between animals or between patterns of locations (spatial and temporal) for individual animals.
• Habitat analyses the habitat content of maps, map sections, home ranges created in ‘Location analysis’, and in the areas immediately around locations.
• Modelling allows resource area dependence and Kaplan Meier survival analyses.
• Statistics displays the statistics output file for the most recently run analysis. Other statistics files, in comma-separated variable (.csv) format can be opened here using the open button.
• Log shows the log for all analyses since the session started.
• Help|Help links to these on-line help files. Note that a set of help files is also packaged with Ranges but these are not as up-to-date as those online.

When an analysis is run, a Progress window will popup giving progress messages, calculation summaries, warnings and errors. The progress window scrolls down automatically by default as it is filled; if you want to read an entry earlyier in the window, check the Disable autoscroll box to enable the scrollbars. If the analysis runs successfully, the progress window will close and the results, usually Statistics, often map data in the main window and sometimes a chart, will be displayed. The contents of the Progress window can be accessed after the analysis in the Log.

Settings changed in analysis windows and files opened in the statistics window will remain unchanged if the window is closed and then re-opened.

Work through the tutorial for an introduction to getting your data into Ranges and starting to analyse it.