Recording Strategies

General

Different people have different requirements for recording what they see. These will vary from just noting the names of the species seen to complete detailed notes including counts, ages, habitats, descriptions etc.   Wildlife Recorder 4 is able to cope with this complete spectrum of needs.

Making Tick Lists

If you simply want to create a simple tick list of species you have seen and are not interested in entering trips and sightings, that is possible.  All you need to do is create a list for the geographic area your are interested in and use the Select Species option to tick off what you have seen.

Normal day by day recording

Most people make notes of the species that they see while on a trip. These notebooks are normally arranged chronologically and then by site visited. This is the exact scenario used by Wildlife Recorder. The typical method of entry is:
 

  • Enter the date and optionally time of the visit

  • Enter the name of the place visited.

  • Enter the details of all the species seen on the visit.
     

The scenario shown above is recommended for normal day by day usage, and can be used to enter your historical records from your notebooks.

 

Entering your historical records

If you wish to keep complete details of your historic data you can employ the normal day-by-day method. Alternatively if you wish to rapidly record the species you have seen into Wildlife Recorder and you do not require to have complete details of your historical records you can enter summaries of your records from whatever lists you already have. What you do need to do is enter sufficient information to allow the generation of those lists you are interested in. We would recommend that you enter at least the following:
 

  • A list of species seen for every country you have visited. Since you will not be entering sightings against a real site you can set up a notional site with a name like "South Africa Historical".

  • A list of species seen for every state/county which you wish to maintain a list for. Since you will not be entering sightings against a real site you can set up a notional site with a name like Arizona Historical"

  • A list of species seen for every individual site which you wish to maintain a list for.

  • When entering in lists as suggested you can either enter the actual date on which you first saw a species or some arbitrary date of your own choosing.
     

Keeping details of the sites you have visited

You can enter details of your sites as you are entering data for your trips. If, while entering a trip, you give the name of a site which Wildlife Recorder does not yet know it will prompt you for complete details of the site.

In order to allow the list facility to work correctly you should enter at least the county/state and country names for each site.

Summarising your sighting into lists

To Wildlife Recorder a list is just a summary of your sightings. Because of this there is no need for you to know which lists you want to keep before you start entering your sightings.

At any time you can ask Wildlife Recorder to make a new list and it will automatically go through all of your sightings to calculate the list contents.

You can keep lists for sites, counties, countries, faunal zones and continents.

Queries, checklists, printed reports etc.

The real power of Wildlife Recorder comes once you have entered your data.  Wildlife Recorder gives you the ability to subset your data on any information you have supplied, even free-form notes.

Once you have performed a query you can view the results on the screen and if required produce a printed report. Wildlife Recorder has several pre-defined report layouts.

Lumping and splitting

With Wildlife Recorder Professional edition you have all the functions you need to change species taxonomy as you require.   However, updates will be made available for download from the Wildlife Computing web site should you prefer not to make your own changes.