Individual ID method - Bull rays

Support
,
1

Hello,

Hope you are well!

Speaking about the Bull Ray wild book.

We’ve been slowly importing all our encounter images and data to the wild me data base - did not go with the bulk import as it is not that many sightings and we had some disorganisation to go through. This means our encounter have been inputted with no particular order of date or individuals.

Back with our other system and when this was a baby project we had made a few matches and gave these individuals nicknames. Although I’m not sure if this would continue to be a suitable method as we grow.

We’ve wanted to match individuals and we get prompted to set an individual ID when they match - but we are unsure what naming system to use for our individual IDs. People seem to have a naming system based on date of first encounter or entry into system, however this won’t be possible for us I think.

Do you have any suggestions on how we should set Individual IDs? Or would it be ok to continue setting friendly nicknames so long as they are all different? Any input would be appreciated.

Thank you very much,
Joana

2

Hi @joanagcl,
Happy to provide some guidance on this. Friendly nicknames should be fine to work with for a while, as long as it is something you are familiar with. The system recognizes species when doing name association, so you aren’t in any danger of stepping on anyone else’s data. If this works for you, go ahead with it. :smiley:

If you want to start building out your catalog to have reference IDs, you can use the “project” functionality. To access this, you go to Administer > Manage Projects > Add Project. There you’ll be able to create a project on this screen:

image
image899×583 30.3 KB

Projects handle the assignment of sequential IDs to individuals associated with encounters in the project.

Here’s the full documentation associated with projects. Projects | Wild Me Docs

Hope that helps!
Tanya