I've been using eBird for years but I'm excited about birdstack's focus on sharing lists. So I've been experimenting with entering my observations into birdstack first, and then exporting them into eBird. It's a few more steps so I'd like to make sure I'm doing this in the easiest way.
Almost all my eBird observations are traveling counts (walking in my neighborhood). So first I create a birdstack Trip with the date, start time, duration, and distance covered. Then I add all my individual birdstack observations to this Trip. When that's done I create a birdstack List that shows only observations in the new Trip. Then I export the List to an eBird data file and import it into eBird.
Is this the easiest way? Do I need to create both a Trip and a List for each of my bird walks?
It sounds like you've got the hang of using trips.
You don't, however, need to create a list for each trip if you don't want to. You can use your default "All observations" list to export to eBird if you want to. You can run an eBird export on that list over and over again, and each time it will export only your new records that haven't already been submitted to eBird. Does that make sense? That might be a little easier than generating a list for each trip.
But if you have (or plan to have) observations that you had previously submitted to eBird before you started using Birdstack, there's a possibility of generating duplicates that way. So you might want to create a list defined by date (say, all observations from April 2008 onward) and then use that to generate your eBird export files.
Every time you generate an eBird export file, it marks those observations as having been exported, so they will not be exported again. That is why you can keep running the export on the same list without generating duplicates.
mikaelb said:
Howdy,
I've been using eBird for years but I'm excited about birdstack's focus on sharing lists. So I've been experimenting with entering my observations into birdstack first, and then exporting them into eBird. It's a few more steps so I'd like to make sure I'm doing this in the easiest way.
Almost all my eBird observations are traveling counts (walking in my neighborhood). So first I create a birdstack Trip with the date, start time, duration, and distance covered. Then I add all my individual birdstack observations to this Trip. When that's done I create a birdstack List that shows only observations in the new Trip. Then I export the List to an eBird data file and import it into eBird.
Is this the easiest way? Do I need to create both a Trip and a List for each of my bird walks?
Thanks!
Mikael
Mikael Behrens
Austin, TX USA
Williamson County
Birding on Broadmeade
Posted Monday, 31 March 2008, 16:10
djringer said:
Hi Mikael,
Welcome to Birdstack!
It sounds like you've got the hang of using trips.
You don't, however, need to create a list for each trip if you don't want to. You can use your default "All observations" list to export to eBird if you want to. You can run an eBird export on that list over and over again, and each time it will export only your new records that haven't already been submitted to eBird. Does that make sense? That might be a little easier than generating a list for each trip.
But if you have (or plan to have) observations that you had previously submitted to eBird before you started using Birdstack, there's a possibility of generating duplicates that way. So you might want to create a list defined by date (say, all observations from April 2008 onward) and then use that to generate your eBird export files.
Every time you generate an eBird export file, it marks those observations as having been exported, so they will not be exported again. That is why you can keep running the export on the same list without generating duplicates.
Hope that helps.
David
David J. Ringer
http://djringer.com/birding
http://birdstack.com
Posted Wednesday, 02 April 2008, 12:16