Fenland site, by Graham Austin / BTO
DemOn | TECHNOLOGY
When you first look at your sites in DemOn, they will appear as multiple overlapping squares.
Organising your sites in DemOn With the arrival of DemOn came the possibility of organising your ringing and nest recording sites to better represent the locations as they are on the ground. This offers a degree of personal satisfaction but, more importantly, enhances the quality and usefulness of your data, past and present, to your own projects, to conservationists and science. Here, Graham Austin provides some real-life examples to illustrate how you can tidy up your existing sites in DemOn. DemOn allows you to define site boundaries and sub-sites (sub-areas, individual net-lines, point locations, nests or nest boxes) precisely. This is a giant leap forward from the location of a site being defined at best to somewhere within a given 1-km grid square with subsites somewhere (known only to yourself ) within that site. When you first view your sites in the DemOn map interface it can be quite eye-opening as to how imprecise the spatial information attached to your records has actually been. For those with a long commitment to ringing or nest recording, the maps based on the best information available to BTO can lead to what can only be described as a nightmare of overlapping squares of 1 km or greater, some of which appear to be duplicated, that has no doubt sent many running for the hills. Duplication of sites is primarily due to small discrepancies / tweaks over the years in site information received. Not previously being able to define site boundaries more precisely has also led to multiple locations being defined using the same grid reference. You’ve always been able to use DemOn to submit ringing encounters and nest
Winter 2020
records, even if you left your sites as you found them, because IPMR place and subsite codes were used as defaults for DemOn location codes. Now though, DemOn contains tools that allow you to tidy up your sites. While still no small task for some, it is nonetheless a one-off task. RINGING SITES
A ringing site can mean different things to different people. It may be that you have simply used a given 1-km square grid reference, maybe with an associated accuracy for any and all ringing activities within that square, or you may have used sub-site codes to distinguish between different ringing sites within it. It may be that your site has very precise boundaries within which you may have used subsite codes to define specific sub-areas, different nets or net-rides or the locations of traps. Pre-existing sites first appear in DemOn as a stack of 1 km squares – one General Site (GS; derived from the IPMR Place) and any number of Encounter Areas (EAs; derived from the various IPMR subsites). In DemOn however, you can define all of these locations precisely.
FURTHER INFO The DemOn Manual (available under the DemOn Help menu) contains step-by-step guidance for using all the editing tools discussed in this article.
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