A user-friendly guide to using distance measures to compare time series in ecology

Time series are a critical component of ecological analysis, used to track changes in biotic and abiotic variables. Information can be extracted from the properties of time series for tasks such as classification (e.g. assigning species to individual bird calls); clustering (e.g. clustering similar responses in population dynamics to abrupt changes in the environment or management interventions); prediction (e.g. accuracy of model predictions to original time series data); and anomaly detection (e.g. detecting possible catastrophic events from population time series). These common tasks in ecological research rely on the notion of (dis-) similarity, which can be determined using distance measures. A plethora of distance measures have been described, predominantly in the computer and information sciences, but many have not been introduced to ecologists. Furthermore, little is known about how to select appropriate distance measures for time-series-related tasks. Therefore, many potential ..., Distance measure test results were produced using R and can be replicated using scripts available on GitHub at https://github.com/shawndove/Trend_compare.
Detailed information on wading bird trends can be found in Jellesmark et al. (2021) below.
Jellesmark, S., Ausden, M., Blackburn, T. M., Gregory, R. D., Hoffmann, M., Massimino, D., McRae, L., & Visconti, P. (2021). A counterfactual approach to measure the impact of wet grassland conservation on U.K. breeding bird populations. Conservation Biology, 35(5), 1575–1585. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13692, .RData files can be opened with R
.csv files can be opened with Excel or a generic text editor.,