How to create charts from the bird monitoring

A number of our customers are downloading data from the Cacophony Portal and making charts showing what birds they have and how they're changing over time. This requires a little bit of messing around in excel.  This post takes you through step by step how to do this.

1. Download our template and give it a name like "Bird analysis for [your project name]"
2. On the Cacophony Portal, select activity, Audio and the date range you would like to analyse. Please also select Include Redacted Audio. You can also chose which locations you would like the report for, or do an advanced search: for example if there are just some species you want to report on. Then press export search results.
3. Open up the downloaded CSV file and copy all the data (CTRL-A, then CTRL-C in windows). Past it into cell A1 in the Data sheet of excel template file you downloaded.
4. Copy cells L2-AI2 into each row of your data: L3-Ln, where n is the number of rows of data.
5. Switch to the Count sheet, right click on the pivot table and hit refresh. This will now show you the number of recordings you have, broken down by location and year.
6. Switch to the Summary sheet, right click on the pivot table and hit refresh. This will now show you percentage chance of hearing any bird, broken down by location and year.
7. You may want to filter out any locations that you want to remove. This can be done by pressing the down arrow by the Row Labels. 
8. You may also want to remove any birds that you don't want to include in your chart. You can do this by unchecking these birds in the pivot table fields.
9. You can now make a chart of the relative bird densities by right clicking the graph, selecting the data and editing the series. For example select the data corresponding to the Grand total, or add series for each year to see how things are changing. Or you could produce a chart for each location.

There are lots of variations you can do with this. If you do something interesting, please share.

Check out this video taking you through these steps.