Trap NZ integration and interface improvements

Yesterday we made a significant release to the Cacophony Portal, changing the way you view videos - in particular expanding the way you can use groups. We also added integration with trap.nz and added a new label: Flagged for review. You can see the brief release notes here. Read on for a more detailed description. Many thanks to the Cacophony team for all their mahi in getting this out.

Changes to the interface for viewing videos

We've made some significant changes to the way you can use groups. A group is simply a group of devices (thermal cameras and or bird monitors). There is a new link at the top of the Cacophony portal called Groups. Clicking on this will show you the groups you have access to.

Accessing Groups on The Cacophony Portal

Groups on the Cacophony Project Portal

You will see a map with blue dots showing where your groups are located and a list of your groups on the left hand side. When you click on one of the groups you will see a list of the devices associated with that group.

Devices in a Group on the Cacophony Portal

This shows the device name, the device health and the device type (thermal camera or bird monitor). The device health is either:

  • a black heart  - we have seen it online in the last 24 hours, or
  • a red broken heart  - we haven't heard anything in the last 24 hours. Device health symbols on Cacophony Portal

When you click on the device name you will see visits for that camera (or the recordings for bird monitors). With a summary for each day.

Visits summary for a device on the Cacophony Portal

Clicking on this will show you a the detail of the visits. The number beside each animal is the number of recordings that makes up each visit.

Visits detail on the Cacophony Portal

Back on the Groups page - you can also easily access the recordings for the group, the users, or the stations - which is part of the trap NZ integration.

 

Trap NZ integration

We have the first version of an integration with Trap NZ working.  The steps involved to get this working are:

  1. Create monitoring stations in trap.nz
  2. Export the stations to a CSV file by clicking on Download CSV
    Export monitoring stations from Trap NZ
  3. Go to the stations tab and select Choose File to import the Trap NZ stations. Note: You need to be an administrator of the group to be able to do this.
    Import Trap NZ stations to the Cacophony Project Portal
  4. If you already have recordings that you want to be tagged to a station then check the box "Apply all stations to recordings starting from a date" and select a date when you want to apply this from.
    Backdate Trap NZ stations to Cacophony Project recordings
  5. Press Confirm Changes and Cacophony will then identify all devices with a similar location and add the station name to all recordings. You will see a map showing the location of your stations
    Location of Trap NZ stations in The Cacophony Project Portal
  6. You click on a station name and see the recordings associated with this station. You can also search for stations on the recording page.
  7. You can export the monitoring data to trap NZ by going back to the devices tab and clicking the button at the bottom called "Export TrapNZ Visits for devices" and selecting a date range.
    Exporting Trap NZ visits from The Cacophony Project Portal
  8. You can then import this file into Trap NZ by going Monitoring, Import, Import Monitoring records and select the file you just exported from The Cacophony Project Portal.
    Import monitoring records to TrapNZ

You now have the monitoring data in trap.nz and you can leverage their visualisations and reporting. At a later date we will look to make this export of data to trap.nz automatic.

Flag for Review label

We have added a new label called "Flag for Review" . We expect people to use this when they want someone else to review a video. To use this, simply click the label button at the bottom of the video and select Flag for review.

Flag for review label on the Cacophony Project Portal

You can search for these videos using the advanced search function on the recordings page.
Searching for flagged for review label on the Cacophony Project Portal

We envisage this being useful when you have volunteers tagging videos and they're not sure how to tag a video.

 

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