In late September this year (2024), the NABat central coordinating team released new bulk upload metadata templates for stationary acoustic surveys and mobile transect acoustic surveys. These templates must be used going forward, and uploads in the format of the old templates will not work. The new templates were introduced in a Community of Practice call. Watch the video recording below.
What does this mean for you?
If you have already processed data and used the old format, there are several ways to submit the data:
Reprocess your data with the new auto-classification software metadata forms, which have been setup to match the new metadata templates. This is not ideal if you have a lot of data or if you have manually vetted data.
Manually reformat your CSV file in Excel to match the new metadata templates. We don't recommend this, since data and metadata can get mixed up, and some categorical fields have new and different accepted values.
Use our new reformatting scripts which will take your CSV in the old format, guide you through reclassifying the categorical fields for each deployment, ensure all required fields are filled, and output a CSV file in the new template format so it can be uploaded directly to your project.
You can find separate scripts to reformat stationary survey data and mobile survey data on our Scripts & Tools page.
For feedback and discussion of these and our other tools, head to the Scripts & Task Automation section of our discussion forum.
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