Retiring monitoring stations has changed species counts and totals

Hi there,
For our latest predator survey we decided to stop monitoring the mangrove area which had 23 stations from 2017 to April 2019 and then 29 stations from October 2019 to October 2020.

In the past I’ve had trouble uploading results if the csv file stations don’t exactly match those on TrapNZ, so I retired the mangrove stations before uploading our latest set of results. Also, 9 stations on private property were not returned (and one resident had moved) - so these were retired as well. However, now when I create a monthly monitoring totals table it appears that the results from the retired stations have been excluded as I have a printout from 2019 of results from 2017 to Oct 2019 that shows higher totals by about the number of retired stations (not exactly though).

  1. Do I need to un-retire the now unused stations to get historical results back?

  2. For an upload to work can there be active (but actually retired) stations on TrapNZ that are not in the csv file? (I can’t remember if the previous problem of mismatched stations was due to a station not being present on TrapNZ or being present but with incorrect details such as GPS or line number - at that time I uploaded the spreadsheet with the GPS co-ordinates - which requires an exact match.)

Thanks your help would be appreciated.

Hi again,

I just tried making active one of the mangrove monitoring stations (M17) that had 6 records, with 1 Rat recorded in both Apr 2017 and Apr 2019. The totals in the right hand side Total column went up by 1 for each of the records and the Rat totals for those two dates also went up by one.

So historical records are not included in the table if stations are retired. This is probably why in the past I had slight discrepancies between spreadsheet results and TrapNZ results after I had retired stations which had non-returned devices. This doesn’t happen with catch results.

Can this be remedied and can there be additional Active (but actually retired) stations present on TrapNZ that are not on the csv file to be uploaded? (Does a mismatch problem only occur when trying to upload results for a station not present on TrapNZ or with incorrect details, such as line number?)

Thanks

Hi @Motucare.

Just checking: are you applying the Retired filter before running the report? By default it is set to Active. You need to change it to - Any - in order to see records for both retired and active stations:

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Dan

Thanks Dan,
No, I am not running a ‘Monitoring Records with Map’ report that has that option. That is not particularly useful for seeing trends over time. I am using the ‘Monthly totals table’ that does not have options for ‘Retired’ ‘Active’ or ‘Any’. I am assuming its default is ‘Active’ as opposed to the Catch Records which must have the default set to ‘Any.’

In the end I chose to just keep the mangrove stations retired, which meant their data is not included in the Monthly totals table - as we are still unsure whether the activity we saw their in the first few years was rat or marine life (the surveys were done during spring tides so stations may have been under water) - and have stopped monitoring there at the moment due to the difficulty of doing so. That way my report is comparing the same set of stations from 2017 onwards.

Kind regards
Jan

@Motucare

Copy that Jan. Yes you are correct - the report is not including retired stations. It probably should be including both active and retired, and ideally have an option to select one or the other, or both. I’ll see if can get that expedited.

Dan

@Motucare

Hi Jan

Just to let you know that the active/retired filter has now been added as an option for the monthly totals. By default, it will select both active and retired, or you can specify one or the other.

Dan

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Thanks, Dan. That’s fantastic! Very much appreciated.
Kind regards
Jan

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