Sarah

I get very confused with the Location and Location Name fields.  I'm hoping that the bug you mentioned only applies to the Location field (we have many examples where different Location Names have been used within the same kilometre squares). Is that the case?

Cheers

Bob

Bob Saville
LWIC coordinator

Thanks for that Charles

I'm still a bit confused though! You mention that only the first location matched will be imported. Surely it is only possible to match Locations. Location Names are simple text fields which can't go through any location matching stage so does that mean there isn't going to be a problem with them?

Cheers

Bob

Bob Saville
LWIC coordinator

Hi,

Seeing as I was the one who highlighted this originally I thought I would check it out now I have the latest version installed as of yesterday.

Sarah, I have just imported four records with three different location names (not in our location table) but all with the same grid ref. They import under the survey all under the first location name, in the event and sample level.

Brian

Agreed.

Brian

Just an aside!

Is it just me or does it seem a bit crazy to talk about location names (i.e names of Locations) and location names (i.e. Location Names). Is there no way to go back to using the word Site instead of Location and end the confusion?

Bob

Bob Saville
LWIC coordinator

Hi Sarah,

I thought it was a bit strange that you found it would work now in 6.9.3. when you said it would be fixed in the next version...

Having tested both ways, firstly without the locations in the location table and then adding them to the location table the problem is the same on our system adding them to the first location in the imported list, be it a location or merely location_name.

I have tested adding the other two locations only to the location table then importing and get the same result with the records associated to the location that is not in the location table and not the others which are.

Brian

Hi Sarah,

Looks very comprehensive and covers most things except that with my testing the problem arises also when choosing to just assign the records to the location name field, whether or not any of the other locations are matched to locations in the Location Table.

Brian

Hi

With a little bit of help from my LRC I have managed to import some data to R6 with abundance and qualifier information. The vital bit of information that was new to me was concatenating in Excel. This will allow me to gather data with abundance and qualifier in separate fields, that make editting and correction a lot easier, then they can be combined (=A1&" "&B1) if the data are in cells A1 and B1. It is a bit messy as the result needs to be copied and Paste Special with 'values and number format' to retain the information when the original abundance and qualifier columns are deleted. So far so good!

However, the Import Data process has an unwanted habit that I cannot see how to alter. Any number without a qualifier, gets called 'adult'. With birds that is not correct and I wish to alter that setting so that when there are no qualifiers, there are no qualifiers added on import. Does anyone know how to alter that default in the import process? If so, please tell!

I have found that deleting unwanted records produces a lot of errors. I ought to copy one here, but there are far more errors than there ought to be.

Cheers, Ian

Hi

I spent about 6 hours yesterday deleting records with no abundance and have been reimporting. Today I have found a problem with one of the imports. The Excel file does not look any different to others I have successfully imported from.

I wanted to inspect the imported data and went to: Data Entry, Observations, (Name of my survey) and the list of Events comes up. I choose the event I wish to examine and click on the + in a box and sample shows with a + in a box. I click on that + and it disappears and no species names appear as part of the sample. This has occurred to all the samples from this particular file.

I thought I would delete the samples, etc and reimport but I cannot as R6 says that the 'item is referenced by other records in the database'. If so, where are they and how can I see them? I tried to right click to see what options there were. Trying 'Quick Report, Species seen by an observer' an empty table appeared saying '9 occurrences' and trying 'Quick Report, Species reports, Detailed species list' shows nothing (ie no occurrences).

Does anyone have any idea why the import has not pulled through the data that are in the Excel sheet?
Does anyone know how I may delete the offending Events to try to import them and have data visible?

[In addition to my post immediately before this one, my example of Blue Tit was unfortunate in that the common name has not changed. The common name is not that from the BOU checklist 2006, as eg 'Great Cormorant' appears as 'Cormorant'.]

I look forward to hearing from someone!

Thanks in anticipation, Ian

Hi Sally

Many thanks for your suggestion - the errors are now corrected.

I was not sure what you meant by 'the hierarchy' but looked in the tables you mentioned and could only find the sample key in the Taxon Occurrence table. I deleted those records and then went back to R6 where I was then able to delete the Sample and Events from Data Entry, Observations.

I checked the Excel file and could find nothing wrong with it, but did ensure that the 'Determiner' field had an entry (it was blank before). The second import worked as expected and I was able to see the records in Data Entry, Observations.

Again, many thanks! Ian

Ian,

Adult as default abundance
I agree, this is a frustrating and bad assumption to make. It's not technically a bug as the Recorder system design document specifies this behaviour. However, I do feel this is a design choice that needs to be changed. As a work-around, we add a generic qualifier of 'present' to all abundances that have no qualifier.

BOU list issues
You need to ask species dictionary questions in the Species Dictionary forum, which John Tweddle, data manager of the Species Dictionary Project, monitors. If you ask species dictionary questions in other places such as this thread, there's a strong chance he won't see it and thus your question is likely to go unanswered. This time, though, I'll need to ask a few questions to get the the bottom of your bird list problem:

I'm not sure what you mean here; could you possibly reword this?

Where do you see this exactly? If I import a record of a blue tit (i.e. 'blue tit' is what's in the species name column of the import spreadsheet), at the species matching stage I choose the BIRDS BOU list and click search. The species that gets matched is this:

Blue Tit (Cyanistes caeruleus (Linnaeus, 1758))

On final import, the record appears as Blue Tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) in the the Observations Hierarchy.

Finally, a word of warning about concatenating abundance qualifiers - make sure you remove spaces from the qualifiers first. So 'Adult female' would become 'Adultfemale'. The import wizard will allow you to add the space back in when you come to the qualifier matching stage. If you do not do this, an abundance of '1 Adult female' will be interpreted as two abundances: the first with a value of 1 with a qualifier of 'Adult' and the second with a value of 'female' and a qualifier of none, which as we know converts to 'Adult'; net result being two entries in your measurements tab looking something like this:

1 Adult
female Adult

Hope that's clear. It's an issue that's easily worked around - you just have to be aware of it.

Charles