Movement & time

The Movement & time tools work on point layers where each point is a position recorded at a moment in time: a GPS track, a fleet log, animal collars, delivery records. They turn that raw stream of fixes into something readable, namely segments carrying a speed, the places where something stopped, and the moments where two targets were close to each other.

All three need the same two things on your layer.

A time field. The attribute holding the timestamp of each fix. ISO 8601 text such as 2026-08-20T14:32:00Z is the safest format.

A target id field. The attribute saying which vehicle, animal or person the fix belongs to. Without it the tools would connect one truck’s position to another’s. Leave it empty only when the layer holds a single track.

These tools follow the same model as the TrajecTools plugin for QGIS, so results are comparable if you already work that way.

Start here

Trajectory speed

Orders the points by time within each target, then connects consecutive fixes into line segments. Every segment carries the distance covered, the time elapsed and the resulting speed, in the unit you choose.

The output is a line layer, so you can style it by speed and read the whole journey at a glance: where the vehicle was held up, where it ran fast, where the track has a gap.

Detect stops

Finds the places where a target dwelled. It looks for runs of consecutive fixes that stay within a maximum distance of each other for at least a minimum duration, and returns one point per stop.

The distance is what absorbs GPS scatter: a parked vehicle still reports positions that jump by a few metres. The default of 50 metres for at least 60 seconds is a reasonable starting point for road vehicles. Raise the distance if noisy tracks split one stop into several, and raise the duration if traffic lights show up as stops.

Space-time proximity

Finds pairs of points that are close in space and close in time, which is how you detect two targets actually meeting rather than merely passing through the same place on different days. Each qualifying pair becomes a line carrying the distance and the time gap.

Set a maximum distance and a maximum time difference. Both have to be satisfied for a pair to be reported.

All the tools

Tool	What it does
Trajectory speed	Orders points by time per target and connects consecutive fixes into segments carrying distance, duration and speed.
Detect stops	Finds runs of fixes that stay within a distance for at least a duration, and returns one point per stop.
Space-time proximity	Finds pairs of points close in both space and time, and returns a line per pair carrying the distance and the time gap.