Setting up a new survey on the warehouse

Firstly, note that in Indicia’s terminology a survey is a dataset owned by one online recording website which has been set up with a specific structure, a bit like setting up the columns in a spreadsheet. As well as being used to categorise records, an important use of surveys in Indicia is to allow you to customise the information you will capture for a record at a survey level. For example, you might run a survey of hedgehogs in your area as well as a survey of garden birds. The garden bird survey could allow the user to tick a box for nesting birds as opposed to non-breeding visitors to the garden. Obviously it would not make sense to provide this checkbox on a form for inputting hedgehog records! Don’t worry about dividing your data up into several surveys if you need to in order to get the right attributes for each survey, as it is simple to join the data back together again when producing reports and maps later. Whilst we are on the topic of terminology, we will be using the following:

  • record or occurrence describes a unique observation of a species on a specified date, at a specified place, by a specified person(s).
  • sample describes the observation event that leads to the taking of zero or more occurrences, e.g. the use of a trap on a particular date by a particular person(s) at a particular place.
  • location describes any named place which you are keeping details of in the system. A location may be a site that you visit for recording purposes, but could also be something like a town or other place name.

Follow these steps to register a new survey for recording on the warehouse.

  1. Login to the warehouse using your warehouse login.

  2. Select Lookup lists > Surveys from the warehouse’s menu. You should now be on a page that shows a grid of surveys that already exist. Note that because your login only has access to configure surveys and other information for your own website, you will only see the survey that is already linked to your website.

  3. Click the New survey button. This takes you to the New Survey page.

  4. Set the title for your survey to “Spot the amphibian” and optionally fill in the description.

  5. Select your website in the Website drop down, to associate the survey with your own website registration.

    Adding our new amphibian survey
  6. Click the Save button.