What Wildbook should this feature be in?
African Carnivore Wildbook
What would you like to see?
Ability to add a second or third social unit via bulk import. At the moment, when you add a photo of an individual under social unit A, that social unit gets saved in ACW. When you do a next upload of that individual, which has changed pack so is now in social unit B, ACW still logs it as unit A (and doesn’t copy the data for social unit B). So, you basically loose very important information in that upload step.
I would like to be able to add an additional social unit via bulk import. The columns is already there, only ACW doesn’t recognize it, if there is already a social unit in the system for that dog.
How would this functionality help you?
It is crucial for wild dog research to keep track of group dynamics. Wild dogs change their pack every couple of year, which means there is a lot of dynamics going on, which is hard to keep track off. ACW could tremendously help us to keep track of this important information. This would allow us to understand dog social dynamics better which is crucial to improve their reproduction and survival.
Wild dogs disperse on a regular basis which means individuals are part of multiple packs over the wild dog’s lifetime. The same functionality would be helpful for other social species as well, e.g. hyenas.
I hope this feature can be considere as wild dog data makes up the largest proportion of the ACW database by almost double the next species (88k vs 41k encounters)
Other organisations like Painted Wolf (@WillD1996 ), Panthera and BPC could benefit from this functionality as well.
Looking forward hearing from you.
Kind regards,
Elke
Note:Not all feature requests can be accepted, but all of them are reviewed by our product team. We’re unable to provide implementation timelines for accepted requests. We are a small team with many competing priorities. Thanks for your understanding!
To clarify, I hope it will be possible to add a second or third social unit to ACW, NOT overwriting the social unit that is already in the system.
It would be great if ACW can add another social unit during bulk imports, which will enable us to keep track of social unit changes over time per individual.
That would mean that after a couple of years, there would be a list of multiple social units attached to an individual.
Hope that makes sense. Please let me know if any questions.
Thanks!
Kind regards,
Elke
Hi @evgils I’m trying to work out which issues we’re addressing here:
Bulk import doesn’t overwrite the existing social unit when the spreadsheet differs from what’s already in Wildbook, requiring social unit updates to be done manually
Bulk import does update the social unit when it differs from what’s in Wildbook but you want it to also track historical social unit data
Thank you for coming back to me.
Let me clarify:
I DON’T want bulk import to overwrite the existing social unit in Wildbook.
I would like to ADD another social unit, when the spread sheet differs from what is already in Wildbook.
Hope that makes sense. Would be great if this is possible!
Got it; thanks! I’m going to close the ticket since I misunderstood this as a bug, not a feature request. In the meantime, you should be able to add the social unit history in one of the following comments fields for your spreadsheet:
Encounter.researcherComments - Unconstrained field for general notes regarding the specific encounter (single annotation and related metadata). Leaves comments on the Encounter page under Metadata > Audit Trail.
Encounter.occurrenceRemarks - Leaves comments on the Encounter page under Attributes > Additional Comments. Use this field if you need the comments to persist on any cloned Encounters.
Occurrence.comments - Leaves comments on the Sighting/Occurrence ID page.
I started the ticket as a feature request. When you close this one, will you open a new one as a feature request? Is this something that you can work on to get developed in the system?
Yes, we do use the comments/remarks fields as well. However, we have over a thousand dogs in the system, which makes it very tedious to go over them one by one and change social units every time group dynamics change.
That’s why this new feature would be of great help!
Looking forward hearing from you.
Kind regards,
Elke
I only meant I’d close the Github ticket I linked to because I had misunderstood it as a bug. This Community post will stay open so we can revisit it when we look for new things to implement.