To create a new Project, select the Projects section in Admin and click Create Project.

You’ll start by naming your project, adding an optional project description, and specifying how long your observations will last. 

Observations can last up to 24 hours and you can specify durations less than 1 minute.  Generally, observations for monitoring projects will often last between 5-30 minutes.  You can end observations early but be careful of doing this routinely, as your data may not be comparable.  For instance, if you scored one interval and ended the observation session, that would cause the behavior you recorded to be calculated as occurring for 100% percent of the time during that observation, which would not be comparable to other sessions that considered behavior over a longer length of time.

Adding Focal Subjects

After creating the project, you will first need to add Focal Subjects to your project.  Here’s how:

1. Select the Focal Subjects tab.
2. Click in the Add Subjects section, type the name of the animal you’d like observe.
   1. If you have not added this animal to ZooMonitor before, their name will not show up in that list. In that case, click the Create Animal button and complete the fields on that form.
3. Select the focal subject from the search options.
4. Click the Add to Project button.

The order of the focal subjects you see in admin will be the same in the app.  If you want to rearrange the order of your focal subjects, click the arrow move icon and drag and drop to rearrange the order.

You can also customize the color of the focal subject tiles in the app.  For instance, you can change the colors to match individual ID bands or group the appearances of different animals (e.g., males vs. females, or adults vs. juveniles).  To change the color appearance of an animal’s focal subject tile in the app, click the colored box on their row and then, either, select a new pre-selected color swatch, enter a specific HEX or RGB value for a color, or pick a custom color in the color picker tool.  As the text in the app is white, you will be stopped from selecting colors too close to white to maintain contrast of the text.

You can remove subjects from a Project at any time by clicking the Deactivate or Remove buttons.  When you deactivate a focal subject, that individual will no longer show up in the app but previously recorded data for that animal will still be available in the raw data export.  Alternatively, when you click Remove, that animal will be completely removed from the project and their data will no longer be linked to them.  If you removed an animal accidentally, you can add them back to the project and their data will be linked back to them.

Adding Habitat Maps

To track the space use of animals using ZooMonitor, you can upload images of your habitat and plot animal locations. 

1. Select the Habitat Map tab. 
2. Click the Add Habitat Map button.
3. Enter a name for the habitat and browse for the map image file (JPG or PNG only).
4. To optionally enable a grid overlay on your image, check the box for Grid in the Recording System section and specify a number of columns and rows.
5. Click Save!

You can upload any image size, but ideally you should upload images that are 1:1 aspect ratio and at least 600 x 600 pixels in size.  Here’s why we recommend that:  First, when you record data in ZooMonitor, the animal location points you plot on the map image are set in a 600 x 600 coordinate system.  If you are planning to export your space use data for manual analysis, you should make sure your images are a 1:1 aspect ratio (trust us, it helps!).  Second, images smaller than 600 pixels in width or height will not be scaled up to fit the map area in the app.  However, images larger than this can be scaled down to fit in the app.

While any image will work, even a sketch drawing from MS Paint, we’ve found it easiest to create maps from a habitat blueprint.  However, even blueprints will often need updating to accurately reflect the habitat space.  You can use any image editing software to do this and one that we’ve found useful is the Pixlr web app (https://pixlr.com/editor/).  You can view a demo for creating maps using Pixlr on our YouTube channel.

Adding Behaviors

Each behavior you add is organized within channels – groups of the same type of behavior that are recorded using the same sampling methods. 

There are a few differences when adding behaviors to each of the three sampling methods, so let's consider each:

Adding All Occurrence Behaviors

1. Click the Create Behavior button to add all occurrence behaviors to your project (or click Add to Ethogram to import them from your Ethogram section).

• Note - as recording all occurrence data is not mutually exclusive, you do not need to configure multiple recording channels as is done with interval and continuous recording.

Adding Interval Behaviors

1. Enter the number of intervals for your session (how much time between intervals will be determined by the session duration you entered on the first Project Settings tab).
2. Click Create Recording Channel and enter a name and subject type, Individual (i.e., focal animal sampling) or Group (i.e., group sampling).
3. Within that newly created channel, click the Create Behavior button to create new behaviors (or click Add from Ethogram to import them from your Ethogram section).

• Note - the Space Use recording channel is turned on by default to allow you to plot animal locations on your habitat maps.

Adding Continuous Behaviors

1. Enter the number of intervals for your session (how much time between intervals will be determined by your session duration you entered on the first Project Settings tab).
2. Click Create Recording Channel and enter a name for the channel (note: you cannot record Groups using continuous sampling methods).
3. Within that newly created channel, click the Create Behavior button to create new behaviors (or click Add from Ethogram to import them from your Ethogram section).

• For continuous recording, you cannot record Space Use data using your habitat maps or record data on Groups.

You can create as many interval and continuous channels as needed.  For example, you can include an all occurrence channel to track high priority behaviors, create an interval behavior channel for recording general activity to identify a time budget, and add another interval behavior channel to document posture.  Here are some common examples of channels:

1. General Activity – includes a full list of general behaviors to generate a time budget.
2. Posture – includes body postures that may provide insight into health status or behavioral thermoregulation.
3. Shade Use – includes whether animals are in sun or shade to identify microclimatic tolerances.
4. Social Proximity – includes categories for how far apart animals are to identify social networks.
5. Height – includes categories for height ranges for species with 3-dimensional habitat us

Depending on your sampling method, your behavior channel may be mutually exclusive (i.e., only allows the observer to select one behavior choice within the channel at a time) or not mutually exclusive.  All occurrence and group scan sampling are not mutually exclusive, you can select multiple choices within those channels at the same time.  In contrast, continuous and interval (focal animal) sampling are mutually exclusive, you can only have one behavior selected at a time.  These differences are based in how these standardized methods are commonly applied.

Specifying Focal Subjects for Each Channel (optional)

You can also customize a channel to only be available for specific subjects. This can be useful when you have different groups of subjects (e.g., adults vs juveniles) that require different behaviors.

1. From the Interval or Continuous tab, select the Edit button next to Channel subjects.
2. Uncheck any focal subjects you want to restrict from that channel.

Adding Behaviors Within Channels

Once you’ve created a behavior channel, you can add behaviors in one of two ways: 1) create new behaviors manually in this project; or 2) import previously configured behaviors from your Ethogram area (see Setting Up Your Account for more details).

To create a new behavior, you'll need to complete the following fields (* optional fields to customize your behavior):

1. 1. Name – the behavior name that will appear in the app.
   2. Description* – a text description of the behavior you can view in the app.
   3. Video Example* - a short video clip of the behavior viewable in the app for training purposes.
   4. Sub-group Name* – an optional group name to split your behaviors within a channel to appear on separate rows in the app.
   5. Behavior Modifier Category Name* – the name of the type of behavior modifier (not shown in export).
   6. Behavior Modifier Values* - a comma separated list of modifiers to record additional behavior details.
   7. Social Modifier Category Name* - the name of the type of social modifier (not shown in export)
   8. Include Associated Animals* - includes a list of animals on the project to record participants in social interactions.
   9. Include Space Use* - all occurrence only option that includes a habitat map to record space use.
   10. Allow Comments* - all occurrence only option that includes a text box to record notes.

Adding Observers

Your last step in creating a new project is to add observers to collect data for the project.

1. Select the Observers tab.
2. Click in the text box that says “Select to add…” and type the name of the observer you’d like to add.
3. Select the observer from the search options.
4. Click the plus icon to add the observer.

Observers will only be able to see projects they’ve been added to.  If you are conducting reliability testing, this can be helpful to specify the observers that have been trained to record data for a project.

Adding Project Materials

You can add training materials to your project for reference by your Observers.

1. Select the Project Materials tab and click Add Material.
2. Enter a name for the resource.
3. Browse to upload a file from your device or click Web Link to add a URL to navigate to.
4. Select the visibility for the resource to be for either All Observers (typical for training materials) or to Manually Assign Observers (typical for testing materials).

Adding Session Questions

You can track independent variables at the start of your observation using Additional Questions.

1. Select the Session Questions tab.
2. Choose a question type from the drop down menu: List, Text, or Number.
3. Add a description of the question to the Name field.
4. For the List option, specify the list of options by separating each choice using commas.
5. Optionally include a default choice in the Set Default Answer field.

Downloading Updates

Before you can start recording data for a project, you need to download that project you created in admin to your app.

1. From the app home screen, click the Download Updates button in the top right.

Its important to remember that ANY change you make in admin needs to be manually downloaded in the app for each device.  If you have multiple observers, we recommend having observers download updates before they start their observations each time.  Adding this step to their routine will ensure your observers are always using the most updated projects.

Next Steps

• View our Tips for Creating Ethograms for advice defining your behavior lists.
• Continue onto Recording Behavioral Observation Data to see what data collection looks like in the ZooMonitor app.