Bulk Import- marked individual vs. encounter individual ID

Support
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1

What Wildbook are you working in?

MantaMatcher

Can you describe what the issue is you’re experiencing?

Not an error per se- just trying to understand the difference between MarkedIndividual.individualID and Encounter.individualID fields for bulk importing. We are uploading 600+ encounters with atlantic guitarfish, some of which have already been ID’d as re-sighted individuals with other software. If we are using “Encounter.sightingID” for encounter number, can we use “MarkedIndividual.individualID” to denote the re-sighted individual number? The Bulk import guide says that these fields are duplicates of each other- do the entries in these fields have to match?

2

MarkedIndividual.individualID and Encounter.individualID both assign an individual ID to an encounter. There is no real difference, just a result of devs accidentally duplicating fields under different names. Make sure to use one or the other. If both fields are present on your spreadsheet, it will be flagged for you to delete the metadata from one of the columns.

Encounter.sightingID is a way for you to group the encounters seen from a specific sighting under one Sighting ID (such as a dive on a specific day and time frame).