Hi there, is there any chance of removing the ‘unspecified’ species category? The full list is pretty extensive and trappers accidentally select unspecified which skews the data.
@tckccoord The category is mainly there to be able to record catches for self-resetting traps.
E.g. a gas trap may record a strike but most of the time the carcasses will be well gone by the time you check the counter so you won’t know whether it is a rat, stoat, weasel, mouse, etc. Hence the “unspecified” category.
We appreciate that this may not apply in many situations. We plan to eventually make the species list configurable by the project administrators - as with monitoring species.
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Ah huh, thanks for the explanation. I’ll just have to keep reminding people to try not to select unspecified! Cheers
@tckccoord You can change what categorys show up on your device - each person would have to adjust it on their own app but would definitely fix the accidental selection situation, without actually deleting it so if you do need to use it all of a sudden (something too far gone to ID!) you can just dip in to settings and select it.
Click on a trap as if you are going to put in a new record, then tap the little cog by the species line. This will open the list of all available species, anything you tick will show up in your personalised dropdown list. We virtually never catch anything besides possums, rats, mice, ferrets, stoats, weasels and an occaisional hedgehog. With just these selected, I can see all our options in the dropdown. If we do catch something else, I can just click that cog in the moment, select the thing I caught, then it will show in the drop-down and I can select it.
Hope this helps!
Hi, thanks for the reply, yes I have let our trappers know about tailoring the list to the species we catch. We have over 60 volunteers so its hard to keep track of what everyone is doing on their apps. Thanks for the reminder to remind them though!
Cheers
I wonder about the best way of reporting catches of those ‘Unspecifieds’.
They seem to be bundled in with ‘Other’ which misleads as it suggests we have caught lots of uncommon or strange critters.
We have only one ‘Other’ - a large slug - whereas we have 171 ‘Unspecified’ in A24s. Being our largest category, I’d prefer they showed as ‘Unspecified’, not ‘Other’.
Agreed … we also use it to record cats so they don’t appear in monthly reports sent out locally. It can still be emotive.
I agree. We use unspecified for A24s. Sometimes someone uses it accidentally, but not that often.