What Wildbook should this feature be in? => Whiskerbook
Hi !
I hope you’re doing well
When we created the locationIDs, I hadn’t really understood that they corresponded to the perimeter used to make the matches, I thought the matches were always against all the photos in the database.
Consequently, we would need the following modification :
Could you please create “Europe” and below the countries “France”, “Italy”, “Switzerland”, “Germany”, “Belgium”, “Luxembourg”?
Could you delete the current location IDs “France”, “Ain”, “Doubs”, “Haute-Savoie”, “Savoie”, “Isère”, “Jura”, please (it won’t be to much of a problem I hope, as all the encounters in these locationIds have already been deleted)?
Can you please create the countries “France”, “Italy”, “Switzerland”, “Germany”, “Belgium”, “Luxembourg” in the “Report an encounter” form, currently the field currently offers no choice.
I can definitely add Europe and the additional countries as sub-regions. I don’t have to remove the existing French cities if you’d prefer to keep specific regions there. If you look at your screenshot, you can see an example of this with Dinarides > Croatia > Gorski kotar nesting under each other. I can make it so that the new options for France look like: Europe > France > Ain, etc. If it’s easier to track your data by just tracking it by country, I can do that, too. Let me know which option works best for you.
We discussed this via email back in April, but the Country menu is a leftover field from our older Wildbooks and isn’t used anymore. The Location ID menu is the primary one to use to select the country/region. We’ve not yet gotten around to removing it from Whiskerbook.
I can definitely add Europe and the additional countries as sub-regions. I don’t have to remove the existing French cities if you’d prefer to keep specific regions there. If you look at your screenshot, you can see an example of this with Dinarides > Croatia > Gorski kotar nesting under each other. I can make it so that the new options for France look like: Europe > France > Ain, etc. If it’s easier to track your data by just tracking it by country, I can do that, too. Let me know which option works best for you.
We prefer the departments (“Ain”, “Isère”, etc) to be removed, please, otherwise some users may use them by mistake and it could undermine the matching process. We would only need "“Europe” and below the countries “France”, “Italy”, “Switzerland”, “Germany”, “Belgium” and “Luxembourg”, please.
We discussed this via email back in April, but the Country menu is a leftover field from our older Wildbooks and isn’t used anymore. The Location ID menu is the primary one to use to select the country/region. We’ve not yet gotten around to removing it from Whiskerbook.
I do remember we talked about it, but talking recently to @ACWadmin1 , they do use the “country” field in ACW. It seems to us that this field is important and not to be removed, because the location IDs could be not linked a country or a geopolitical delimitation and it therefore seems important to keep the “country” information in a specific field (even if in our particular case, our location ID will be the country, but for some studies the location ID could be “Europe” and not the country).
Hi @Anastasia & @Lucas, I’d like to confirm here that for ACW, Whiskerbook and Wild North, the country field is very important.
I can see how Wildbooks dealing with marine species would find that field less relevant but with land-based species, it’s very important.
Among other reasons, the geo-political boundary is important to governments as it applies to data residency and ownership and so we need to be able to segregate data by country. We’re also aware of scenarios where national legislation restricts where local wildlife data is stored and how it gets disseminated and used. Also, research work funded by national or pan-national government bodies can require reporting on datasets by country.
We view location IDs as purely a matching filter that may or may not correspond to geo-political areas like countries.
So we need both fields to remain in these Wildbook instances.
Hi @Anastasia, I realize that it appears no countries have been set up in Whiskerbook, which is a surprise to me! In addition to the countries listed by @Lucas, we’ll need a whole bunch of other countries added too. We already have sightings from countries in South America and I expect to see sightings in Iran by Panthera in the near future.
I need to add this to my to do list - get a list of all countries needed in Whiskerbook. Unfortunately, I’m away this week so will only be able to get to this next week.
Hopefully it’s fairly easy to add these so that they can be selected from the Report an Encounter option as well as filtered in the Encounter and Search country field search filter options.
No worries; it looks like there’s a default country list that can populate with the full list of countries that we just hadn’t enabled in Whiskerbook. It’s live now:
