User Training Videos

1. Training Materials

1. Reporting Animal Observations

1. This mini-presentation will guide you through the steps of recording your observations of animals at your site. There is a separate training presentation for reporting plant observations at your site, however, many of the steps overlap. If you are observing both plants and animals at your site, you may wish to also view the presentation on reporting plant observations.

   This information is also available on USA-NPN website at www.usanpn.org.

 

1. In this presentation, we’ll focus reporting your observations online using Nature’s Notebook.

 

 

 

 

1. Enter a username and email address. You can use your email address as your username.

 

1. Then fill out the participant information – your name and address. All the fields marked with a red asterisk are required.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. This will bring you to your Nature’s Notebook home page. Using the navigation at the top, you can…

Alexis LincicomeAL2011-01-05T09:10:18.518000000

change screenshot

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. When you ‘add a new site’ you…

 

 

 

 

 

1. Note the help icon on all of these pages.

 

1. We also encourage you to provide additional site information.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Clicking either of these “Add or Edit Animal Checklist” buttons will take you to the “Animal Checklist” page.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Clicking on the “Create Datasheets” button, then selecting “Create all datasheets”, provided me with copies of a Cover Sheet, an Animal Checklist, and a Phenophase Datasheet for each animal on my checklist. Because I have also registered a plant (in this case, a red maple), to this site, my packet also includes a Phenophase Datasheet for the maple.

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change screenshot.  see what alyssa wants to do about this

 

1. Here is a copy of my datasheet for the American toad that I added to my checklist. Note that  

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new datasheet screenshot (quantity column)

 

 

 

 

 

1. Use this datasheet to record your observations when you see or hear a goldfinch in your site when you are observing. We recommend taking both the datasheet and a print out of the full phenophase descriptions when you go outside. You may collect weeks or months of data on the datasheet and submit it all at once, or submit each day’s worth of observations online as you progress through the season.  However, the sooner you enter your data online, the sooner you and others will see your data in our online visualization tools.

 

 

 

 

 

1. Once you’re ready to submit observations online,

 

 

1. You will be taken to the “Enter Observations” form.

 

 

1. You will be provided with the data entry table for this animal, in this case, American Toad.

 

 

1. You can hover over the phenophase name (adults feeding, for example) to review the detailed definition of the phenophase.

 

 

1. And choose the date you made your observations

 

 

1. For those Phenophases that you did see or hear you will be asked to give abundance or intensity estimations.  For example, if I saw one American toad adult on land feeding, two adults in the water, and also heard many overlapping calls that I recognized as American toad calls, I will click “Y” for ‘adults on land’

 

1. And type “1” in the “How many?” box

 

1. Click “Y” for ‘adults in water’

 

1. And type “2” in the “How many?” box

 

1. I will click “Y” for ‘adults feeding’

 

1. And type “1” in the “How many?” box.  This was the same one I saw on land, but both phenophases apply to that individual animal.

 

1. I will click “Y” for ‘vocalizing’

 

1. And then select an option from the “What value?” drop-down menu, in this case ‘overlapping calls’.  If you hover over the blue information icon to the left of the menu, you will see more detailed information for the available options.

 

1. If you heard overlapping calls that you suspected where from the American toad but you were not sure, you should instead click “?” and choose “overlapping calls” from the menu.  If you learn in the future that the calls you heard on this date were definitely from the American toad, you can come back to this column and click “Y” for the phenophase and resubmit your observation for this date.

 

1. I did not see any toads mating so I will click “N” for this phenophase

 

1. Nor did I see any dead toads.  If you click “N” for a phenophase, do not type or choose anything for abundance or intensity for that phenophase.

 

 

 

1. This will quickly set all of your observations to “no” for this species on this date. If you did not check for one of these phenophases, you can click on the circled choice and it will be unselected.  You might want to do this if, for instance, you hear frog or bird calls at your site but you do not know how to identify which species the calls are coming from.  Since you have opted to ignore them and not even bother to figure out which species they come from, you should leave all choices uncircled, indicating you did not check for that phenophase.

 

 

 

 

1. From here, you can enter further observations, or use the navigation controls at the top of the page to other functions within Nature’s Notebook.

 

 

1. This concludes our presentation on reporting your observations of animal phenology. Thank you for your time and interest in our program!

 

File Type	application/vnd.ms-powerpoint
File Title	Training Materials
Author	Theresa Crimmins
Last Modified By	Alexis Lincicome
File Modified	2011-04-22
File Created	2010-07-23

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