Features

Features of bird ringing software

Bird ringing software should capture offline at the ringing table, generate the finished report file from the captures of a project, flag implausible entries instantly as a warning, and suggest ring numbers consecutively from the ring series – these are the four core features BirdDoc delivers.

• Offline capability

  Offline capability means every catch is recorded directly at the ringing table, even with no internet connection at all. The data is stored safely on the device and synced as soon as a connection is available again.

• Report file

  The report file is the file with which a project reports its captures to its ringing scheme – in Austria the IWM file for the ringing centre. BirdDoc generates it at the push of a button from all the captures in a project as a ready-made report file in the IWM format, without anyone rebuilding the spreadsheet by hand.

• Plausibility warning

  A plausibility warning appears while you record, the moment a measurement or entry falls outside the usual range for the chosen species – the mistake is caught at the ringing table, not months later.

• Ring series logic

  The ring series logic tracks each ring series consecutively and suggests the next free ring number automatically – transposed digits and doubly issued rings are avoided.

• Recapture history

  The recapture history shows the earlier captures of the same bird the moment a ring number is typed in: date, species, ringer, measurements, age and sex. If the sex entries in the capture history contradict each other, the note about it stands beside the form before the new capture is saved. On paper that would mean leafing back through years.

• Import of existing data

  The import of existing data brings earlier captures from an existing report file into a project so that nobody starts from scratch – in Austria from the IWM data report. Before anything is written, a preview shows what would happen: how many captures would be taken over, which ringers and stations would be newly created, which captures are recognised as already present and skipped, and which rows are faulty, each with its row number and reason.

• Analysis

  The analysis reads the same captures one level up: key figures such as captures, species, capture days and recapture share, the first records of the species in the chosen period, the last capture day compared with the previous one, and charts of the most frequent species, of captures per capture day and of capture activity by hour of the day. The period can be chosen, from today through the current week to the season or to a freely set date. The figures are computed on the server, and that needs reception.

• Recording together

  Recording together means that several people in an organisation work in the same projects and see the same captures; each organisation stays on its own. Anyone who helps at the station without an account of their own is kept as a ringer without an account, can be created right while recording and linked to an account later, as soon as the person gets one.

• Stations and nets

  Stations and nets are the place details of a capture. A station carries its place code, country, region and coordinates once, and every capture at that station inherits them instead of carrying them along individually. In addition, a project keeps a net list with the number and the number of shelves per net: a net number that is not in the list, or a shelf that this net does not have at all, is flagged as a note right while recording, before the transposed digit reaches the report file.

• Configurable per project

  Configurable per project is what ringing projects differ in: which optional fields the form asks for, how finely fat score and muscle score are graded, in which months the season lies, and on which weekday at which time the ringing week rolls over. What a project does not collect never appears in its form in the first place; season and week boundary define what the current season and the current week mean in the analysis.

• Special cases that paper handles badly

  Special cases are the captures that on paper were always a note in the margin: a destroyed ring that uses up its number without a bird belonging to it; a species that is not in the species list; a dead recovery with the circumstances of death; a capture outside the standard capture protocol, such as a hand capture. Each of them has its own entry or its own marker in BirdDoc, asks for exactly the details that belong to it while recording, and lands correctly in the report file.

BirdDoc is the digital station journal for bird ringing. Request access