Adding animal sighting, scats & predator kills

Feature Requests
#1

I want to add animal sighting, scats & predator kills.
The sightings are observations as I walk the tracks.
I also want to record weasel & cat sightings, rat scat & predator kill -(recent tui kill).
I also want to add bird sighting (kereru & morepork sightings) that aren’t part of a bird count…
What is the best way to do this?
Do I do this via points of interest?
Many thanks Sarah

#2

Kia ora,

Thanks for getting in touch.

At the moment we don’t have functionality to record animal sightings, scat monitoring, or bird counts outside of a formal bird count. I’ve let the dev team know that these could be a potential future feature. Meanwhile, a site like iNaturalist might be a good tool for these things.

Predator kills - other users have been known to add a trap to their project, in your case you might call the trap “Predator”, then record predator kills on that trap. However, if you’re wanting to record kills of things that aren’t pests (e.g. tui), then it’s likely better for the data integrity of your project to not record them as kills, as that will skew your project stats.

You could create Points of Interest for these events in the meantime, but:

  • A POI only has a date (without time)
  • A POI Record has a date and time, but it seems like a pain to have to create a POI & POI record for each different observation
  • We can’t make any useful generic reports from this sort of POI

Hope that helps!

Ngā mihi,
Sarah
(she/her)

#3

Kia ora Sarah,
on our project we have used the custom monitoring types feature to record sightings, scat and animal sign etc.
So from project > Project categories > Monitoring type
Then I’ve added “sighting” etc as categories. We can then create one-off monitoring points which the team can log records against with a species, photo and notes. These points can be retired if they’re just single events, but the data record remains. This then means we can map and report on the data which suits our needs :slightly_smiling_face:
Cheers, Emma

1 Like
#4

Hi Sarah.
Thanks for your reply. I use iNaturalist to map flora on the property.
Being able to load and pull up data on scats and kill on the trap nz app would give a great picture of where predators hang out. It has helped me with better trap placement.
I have been creating a monitoring point and calling it a POI - as the other group is doing below. I hadn’t thought of retiring them after. Some of the points are very active so I will kept those.
My data entry has been

  • lure - none
  • event - select from - predator kill, sighting, scats
  • protocol - same selection as above
    & notes.
    Trap NZ is a great app & I thank you for all your work it’s amazing.
    Sarah
#6

Hi Emma,
Thanks for the reply. I have been doing the same thing. I hadn’t thought of retiring the observation so that’s a tip I will use to stop the app getting too cluttered.
What do you call the monitoring point? Do you just name it sighting/scats? I have been naming mine as POI 1/2/3 etc but it might be better to record the monitoring points as what is seen for example cat sighting/tui kill/hedgehog scats etc.
thanks Sarah.

#7

Ah okay great! Yeah we just call them something relevant such as sighting.
Emma